Most material on the net deals with spawning a separate instance of Internet Explorer with WIN32OLE. Thats all well however I'd really like to be able to control, or rather monitor an existing Internet Explorer instance. I don't need to control it directly, just check its state, i.e has the page finished loading?. Is this possible with win32ole? Due to restrictions I can't implement any addon gems so Watir is out of the question (if it indeed can do what I'm asking) cheers! EDIT: Using Ruby!