Is there a way to embed a web control in a Windows application that renders using anything but Trident (IE)?

Question

Hi,

I have heard mention that some desktop applications are pretty much just wrappers for websites now.

I have even had the occasional problem that has been best solved this way in the past and I can see it being really useful for current applications development.

However, one problem I always seemed to run into was that the Web Site display controls in Visual Studio use the Trident (Internet Explorer) rendering engine. This tended to be IE6 rendering, but I'm not sure if newer machines in turn use IE7 rendering.

Is there any easy way to use say Gecko (Firefox) or even Webkit (Safari/Chrome) for rendering?

Ultimately I would like to be able to easily plug in this dependency and in turn have a (mostly) compliant framework to develop with and to in turn have consistent rendering for all users.

Please mention if there are any licensing concerns.

Also feel free to ridicule me as I know what I'm asking kind of seems like asking for a "just plug in" internet browser :)

Answer 1

I've personal experience with both Trident and Gecko. TomTom HOME 1.x hosts Trident, as an ActiveX control. There have been projects to adapt the COM interfaces to Gecko, but they seemed rather far-fetched. We've tried embedding Gecko, and that wasn't too hard. In the end, we reversed our approach though. TomTom HOME 2.x is a XulRunner application. One problem, don't get tempted to write anything but your UI in Javascript. With XulRunner, you can do most things JS can in C++ too, using XPCOM.

Licensing under MPL is no big deal; your private code is just a "plugin" not subject to the MPL.