Swing Browser Take 2: MozSwing

By mturkel | July 21, 2008

LimeWire has included the SWT web browser for awhile now, embedding it in our Swing application using the SWT-AWT bridge. Unfortunately, this only works on Windows and we need a browser on all platforms. Though Sun’s lightweight WebKit-based JWebPane is coming, it is uncertain when … Enter MozSwing.

MozSwing embeds Mozilla (more specifically, Xulrunner) in Swing and can be used like any other Swing component as it handles most of the lightweight-heavyweight issues for you. It gives you access to XPCOM and all manner of DOM manipulation.

The simplest way to use it is through MozillaPanel:

MozillaPanel mozilla = new MozillaPanel();
someSwingContainer.add(mozilla);

That’s it!

To navigate programatically:

mozilla.load("http://limewire.com");

Here is MozSwing in LimeWire:

Also, if you already have Flash installed for Firefox, it plays Flash right out of the box.

There is very little information on the SourceForge project page but more can be found on the mailing list.