invoke-html-browser

Arguments: path-or-url

On GTK, this function simply places the requested URL onto the system clipboard for the user to paste into an HTML browser. The alternate function invoke-private-html-browser may be more useful on GTK, or in general. The rest of this page pertains to the Windows platform.

Displays a web page or file in an HTML browser program. If any of certain popular browsers is already running, then this function will use that browser, and otherwise will start up the user's default HTML browser program and use that.

An existing browser will be used even if it was not started up by lisp. This is faster than starting a separate browser just for Lisp, but may cover unrelated content to which the user may wish to return. To use only a browser instance that was started up by lisp, call invoke-private-html-browser instead. (See also use-private-html-browser.)

This function first looks for any running Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, or Netscape browser, and uses that if found. If none of those popular browser programs is found to be running, then the user's default HTML browser program is started up and used.

If some other program is registered as the user's default HTML browser, then this function should still work but may start up a new instance of the browser on each call, which will likely be slow and accumulate lots of browser windows with multiple calls.

If this function believes that it successfully displayed the requested page, then true is returned, and otherwise nil is returned.

The argument may be either a complete URL (such as "https://franz.com/support/documentation/") or a complete path namestring (such as "c:/windows/temp.txt").

It is possible that this function will not work with a future version of one or more of these HTML browser programs if the the keystrokes that invoke a URL or filename change. In this situation, we will likely be able to make a patch to handle the new version. Please contact Franz Technical Support (support@franz.com) if such a situation arises.

In earlier releases, invoke-html-browser used a DDE interface to invoke a running Internet Explorer or Netscape 4.x (if any). This is no longer done, and instead a technique that emulates keystrokes in browser is used, as was done already with Netscape 6.x and Mozilla, and with all four browsers by invoke-private-html-browser. This change was made for consistency now that the newer technique has proven itself, and to avoid a couple of problems with the DDE interface. If this (unexpectedly) leads to a backward incompatibility, please see invoke-html-browser-using-dde.

Copyright (c) 1998-2016, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
This page has had moderate revisions compared to the 8.1 page.
Created 2016.6.21.