Warning: In-game shop client does send information used to identify your client, and theoretically anyone catching that information can make purchases in the Anarchy Online store! If you wish to use the in-game client to browse around Internet, any site you use can that information! You are warned!
As a side note, FunCom does not seem to use any sort of link layer security, all of the data is sent in plain text over Internet, thus anyone between you and FunCom server can use that data as well!
With 18.4, Anarchy Online got a new in-game shop, that is working through in-game browser. The browser doesn't have any sort of controlling however, thus it is said to be "locked" as an in-game shop. However, after quick glance, it is not really locked to anything on software side. It just is Apple WebKit based browser engine built into a window without controls, and is such hard to get to a page you want it to go. It just opens a specific web address that happens to be the in-game shop.
Now, it is not hard to get Windows or Linux hosts to think some domain to other IP address than what DNS points it to, as system specific hosts file is usually the first source where address resolving is done. So all we need to do to have our own page is to point FunCom's shop, aoshop.funcom.com, to a website we want to show. It is to be noted that it specifically asks for the resource /shop/
Now knowing what it does, it is somewhat simple to point it to other websites; just make the hosts file point it to IP address we want. For Windows, you can do following:
Edit Windows hosts file with notepad (notepad %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)
to contain following line pointing to own server, IP in this case points to my own server:
83.145.200.22 aoshop.funcom.com
After I had done this, I was able to see what the in-game browser was and what it did. And first I just put in simple HTTP redirect to Google: Image 1: redirect.
Without address bar or even back button, it was not much of use, so I decided to write bit of HTML and PHP to get address bar. And while at it, I made back and forward buttons with JavaScript, making a simple browser to work with iframe: Image 2 browser.
"Browser" contains 3 forms; 2 first ones are just back and forward javascript buttons, third one contains address bar and Go-button that uses HTTP POST to send wanted address to page itself which in turn will read the POST data and put that URL as iframe source. It isn't much of features or look much, but it does work if you just need to look out page or 2 while in-game without wanting to tab out.
Because the original shop domain was "transferred" to other IP address, it is not possible to use the AO shop normally though. To get access to the shop, you need to remove the modification to your hosts file for it to work. It is not possible to use the shop with IP address, so workaround with other DNS name doesn't help. But if you need AO-Universe, Auno or like more than the shop, this is nice change and no much of problem.