Hosting browser in WPF

Question

Is it possible to host any other web browser beside IE in WPF desktop application?

Edit:

If yes, how?

Answer 1

Not without creating your own custom host and the associated interop.

The WPF WebBrowser control uses the COM interfaces exposed by IE to work. If you want to use Firefox or Webkit, you'd need to build a managed wrapper for the browser (or find one, I suppose) and then wrap this in a WPF user control. This wouldn't be trivial since these browsers likely use GDI/GDI+ to do drawing and an HWND for window management, which can work with WPF, but you have to work through a lot of interop issues.

I've thought about doing this myself, but then thought that it might be just as easy (given my limited purpose at the time) to create a new WPF-based browser using Document, since then it could participate in WPF transformations and animations and expose the DOM to the visual tree natively.

Answer 2

There is a WPF control available for hosting an instance of Google's Chrome browser: http://chriscavanagh.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/wpf-chromium-webbrowser-source-code/