Disable the in-game links

[dragon01 902]

In-game links are one of those ideas that seem fine until you try them in practice, on a normal computer. Today, I was encountering abnormal lag in ArmA, only to find, after quitting the game, that the game has fired up my browser in the background. Previously it would crash the game altogether (usually an OOM exception), but now that I upgraded to a beefy 64bit system it no longer does that, but the load still lags the computer considerably. I don't usually run into this (because I know the game well enough already), but I noticed that a whole lot of links buttons take you to a website on the internet, opening your default browser (and whatever crapload of tabs you might have in it). Not only that, the game neither warns you nor quits after you click such a link, making for a bad experience.

 

At the very minimum, there should be an option to disallow the game from opening browser windows. Even better, wouldn't it be much more logical to allow the game to load Wiki pages and the like within itself? The game is already able to retrieve news from internet, why not documentation? I think that no in-game button or menu item should take you out of the game and into the internet. Alt-Tabbing, especially for those who play in reduced resolution, is generally problematic, not to mention clunky. Additionally, every bloody browser these days is a Chromium ripoff, which means it's a huge memory hog that will have to fight the game for resources, possibly crashing both itself and ArmA (like it usually did on my old computer). Ideally, all the relevant documentation would be inside the game, without any additional overhead.