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In NetBeans development, there is only one way to invoke the 'default' browser by: import org.openide.awt.HtmlBrowser.URLDisplayer; .... URLDisplayer.getDefault().showURL(url); However, developer often needs to explicitly display the target url in either the current 'default' external browser, or the 'internal Swing HTML browser'. I.e., the IDE platform needs to support both modes: When you browse a URL, you sometimes want internal, you sometimes want external; and the client code typically knows which mode. Thus, showUrl() might have a target parameter, or there might be multiple methods in the URLDisplayer interface.
URLDisplayer is part of core
There is no real HTML browser that can be embedded in GUI and especially the Swing component has very limited set of supported features.
That said if you insist on something like Swing HTML browser you can - either create your own JEditorPane, assign HTML editor kit to it and handle hyperlinks - or iterate through all HtmlBrowser.Factories to find one providing Impl that returns not-null from getComponent and create HtmlBrowser using this factory (optionaly with toolbar and location field.) The plan is to remove Swing browser completely