Chandra’s Page

Version 1.10.1 is here, and one of its new features is an incredibly handy help system, accessible by pressing F1. The quality of the documentation is excellent, and I weep tears of joy that Second Life finally has a decent manual. The new in-world help is also accessible via browser from outside Second Life.

Which may lead you to ask, “So how does SL display web pages inside the client?” It’s because the first part of Linden Lab’s work to integrate the Mozilla browser with the SL client is up and running now. The in-world help window is an embedded browser window.

Which may lead you to ask, “How can I browse to arbitrary websites inside SL?” This is a simple matter of hacking one of Second Life’s configuration files.

On Windows, the file to edit is

C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\
  SecondLife\user_settings\settings.ini

Add the following line:

HtmlHelpHomePage http://sl.nanoshock.net/gateway/

The URL above is a gateway page created by Velox Severine. It provides you with a text field in which you can enter any URL you like, then redirects the browser to your desired page.

You’ll need to restart Second Life if it’s running before these changes take effect. In fact, you’re probably best off making these changes without the client running; SL writes to the settings.ini file to save things, and it’s just safer all around if you’re not fighting SL for the file.

So far, the browser doesn’t appear to have support for cookies, and things like Flash are a bit dodgy, but there are several SL hackers already hard at work on figuring out whether or not these things can be enabled in the current client. Stay tuned.