Some systems come with either the SpiderMonkey installed or as an option. It would be good to test if you can take the easy path and let the system take care of installation through a package system. Below are listed instructions on what package you need to install on various systems (please help improve the list). If all goes well you can proceed to rebuilding ELinks.

On Debian testing or unstable, install the packages libsmjs1 and libsmjs-dev by running:

$ apt-get install libsmjs1 libsmjs-dev

So, you need to get (and install) SpiderMonkey and then recompile your ELinks (if you installed SM properly, ELinks should autodetect it during the configure phase) and you are ready to fly.

Note that this procedure enables you to install SpiderMonkey, but in such a way that it might not work with anything else but ELinks. It is unlikely that anything else is ever going to use SpiderMonkey on your system, but if you want to take the safe way, get SM and follow the instructions in src/README.html instead. You will probably need to do some checkouting of bits of the Mozilla CVS tree and so, have fun.

To get SpiderMonkey source, go at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/ and fetch the newest js- tarball there (js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz at the time of writing this; you may try the RPMs, but we didn't test them).

$ cd elinks
$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf js-1.5-rc6a.tar.gz

Next, you need to patch it so that you will have any chance to install it as you fetched it. Grab it in ELinks at contrib/js-1.5-rc6a+elinks.patch (if you have a different version, still try to go ahead, you might have some success), then go to the SpiderMonkey directory (called js) and apply it as

$ cd js
$ patch -p1 <../contrib/js-1.5-rc6a+elinks.patch
$ cd src

Now, edit config.mk and adjust the $PREFIX variable - you probably won't like the default value - ELinks will find it there, but your dynamic linker likely won't.

E.g., for /usr/local installation:

$ sed 's#^PREFIX = /opt/spidermonkey#PREFIX = /usr/local#' < config.mk > config.mk.t
$ mv -f config.mk.t config.mk

Now you can finally go for it:

$ make -f Makefile.ref
$ make -f Makefile.ref export

Now install it:

$ su -c 'make -f Makefile.ref install && (ldconfig -v | grep libjs)'

Check for:

libjs.so -> libjs.so

If all went well, you can proceed to rebuild ELinks now. If something broke, see you on #elinks @ FreeNode or in the mailing list. You may add your options to ./configure as usual; SpiderMonkey should be autodetected.

$ cd ../..
$ ./configure

Check for "Ecmascript ……………….. SpiderMonkey" in Feature summary.

$ make
$ su -c 'make install'

Enjoy.

Likely not. The ECMAScript engine provides only the language compiler and some basic built-in objects, and it's more than likely that the problem is on our side in the implementation of some of the HTML/DOM objects (perhaps we just haven't bothered to implement it at all yet). So better tell us first, and if we think it's not our fault we will tell you to go complain to Mozilla (better yet if it does not work in the Mozilla browsers neither ;-).

..and you don't fear some coding? That's fine then! ELinks is in no way tied. to SpiderMonkey, in fact the ECMAScript support was carefully implemented so that there are no SpiderMonkey references outside of src/ecmascript/spidermonkey.*. If you want to implement an alternative ECMAScript backend, go ahead - you will just need to write an autoconf detection for it and tie it to src/ecmascript/ecmascript.c, which should be easy. We await your patches eagerly.