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When I want to try some packages that need xwidgets, I found Arch linux's default Emacs has not Xwidgets support. This is not the only distribution that doesn't include Xwidgets in compiling Emacs. I saw Debian had the same issue before as well.

I compiled Emacs with Xwidgets and it works fine. Does anyone know why this feature is not turned on by default for several distributions? It seems this is due to some problem of webkitgtk before, but webkitgtk is good today. I'm curious why this great feature of Emacs is still not default. (AFAIK, it was introduce in 25.1.)

Wei-Ting
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Originally the feature relied on webkit1gtk, this made it unacceptable for distributions as it continued to accumulate security vulnerabilities that didn't get patched. Some even got rid of the package completely, for example it's no longer in the official package repositories on Arch Linux.

Thankfully the feature switched to webkit2gtk (which gets regular security updates), but hardly anyone knows about this. I wouldn't be surprised if the same goes for people packaging Emacs. You might want to ask these people yourself and tell about your experience, that's the only way to know for sure.

There are other reasons not to enable it, it would further increase the dependency list of Emacs by a relatively heavy-weight one for no clear benefit. Sure, it's cool that you can browse something in Emacs, but it's neither terribly good (any of the webkit using browsers is far better in terms of UX) nor something commonly used by packages.

wasamasa
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