A Big Turn-Off!

A year or so ago, the DarqUI Unified Notifications app was fitted with two new features to overcome some limitations in EverQuest II, namely the absence of a fullscreen windowed client display and an increasingly terrible in-game browser experience. The new DarqUI feature package was named the URL Helper, which you can find out more about in this video and in this eq2interface.com article.

In December of 2021, Daybreak addressed both of these deficiencies nicely, so now we have a checkbox in-game to use borderless fullscreen mode, and the game now properly translates Internet page requests out to your Windows browser. Using these two changes together results in a big improvement to what smarty-pants tech types call the UX.

In a recent Discord conversation with Darq Side member Ayel, he pointed out that the convenient alias commands from the URL Helper video were no longer working. I realized that even though the browser client is extinct, the FSW code needed some work. The DarqUI Browser has gotten just a bit of retrofitting to accommodate the changes, so if you are still running the URL Helper and had abandoned the aliases, you should be able to use those once again after you get updates with the utility.

But fortunately there are some replacement aliases that will eliminate needing to invoke the internal browser or run the URL Helper at all. And even though the DarqUI Notifier app should still be used to check for DarqUI and EQ2MAP updates, I recommend that you turn off the URL Helper and replace the aliases in your eq2.ini if you are using them.  Here are the new ones:

alias fsw:cl_borderless true
alias fswoff:cl_borderless false

To disable the URL Helper and remove any URL channels that it had set up previously, uncheck the boxes like so:

I realize the checkbox labels make it sound like you're disabling the Windows browser while playing, but unchecking is definitely what you want to do here. The notifier will ask if you want to remove URL channels, and you want to answer Yes:

If the game is running, the notifier will prompt you to log out and then click OK. This is because a logged-in character won't get its URL channel removed, and you'll have to repeat the process of disabling the helper.

So that's it! It's not often that we can remove complex software and get better results, but this is one case where that happens. Thank you!