World’s first F# web browser runs on Linux using Gtk and WebKit
After a long break I finally managed to do some programming for fun. This time I decided to see what WebKit has to offer and at the same time create the world’s first browser written in F#. I whipped it up in a couple of hours and the the whole experience was highly enjoyable, thanks to F#’s succinct syntax and WebKit’s and Gtk#’s easy APIs. In fact it got me so positively wound up that I’ve put shampoo on my toothbrush and then I didn’t remember if I washed my hair already. The only thing missing was MonoDevelop with full F# support, but that I guess, will happen sooner or later. I would also love to see MS finally release F# under Ms-PL so that I could use it for something actually useful. Anyway, here’s a screenshot:
Compiled binary is here, but good luck getting it to run. Source code it here.
If you decide to run it, I would recommend doing that on Ubuntu Karmic (9.10 alfa 2). When I run that on 9.04 it crashes and I think that an older version of WebKit is responsible for that.

October 31st, 2009 at 22:08
Very nice. I thinking about my own webrowser for my linux box. May be it’ll be good project for learning fsharp.