VB.NET - Webrowser freezes when navigating from Form Load event

Question

I'm trying to load up a YouTube page using Visual Studio 2008 and a very simple Visual Basic project that contains just a WebBrowser. I want to load the page when the form loads:

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As Object, 
    ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    WebBrowser1.Navigate("http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_example_1.html")
End Sub

Every now & then (occurs once every 3-5 times, but varies), the form just shows a blank white box.

Could someone help me understand why this happens please.

Edit: This 'freeze' happens for any page, such as http://www.google.com. Is my WebBrowser control broken? Only seems to happen when i place the navigate code in the Form Load event, hmmm strange.

Answer 1

This is probably (almost certainly) happening because a form's Load event occurs before its first Paint event, so once in awhile the WebBrowser finishes navigating to Google (or wherever) before the form paints itself the first time, and thus the WebBrowser shows up as just a white box.

A very simple solution to this problem is to just put a Timer control on the form with a short Interval (say, 100 ms), set Enabled to true, and in its Tick event disable the Timer and then call Navigate(...) on your WebBrowser.