.Net WebBrowser Control encapsulating anything else but IE?

Question

We're using SHDocVw.dll for providing a web browser control to some of our users that access our system through a gadget they install on their computers. Now, that control encapsulates IE. Anyone knows of ways to let the users choose what browser to encapsulate?

EDIT - Clarifying: I'm interested in being able to encapsulate another browser. Not necessarily doing it with SHDocVw.

Answer 1

You cannot change which browser SHDocVw encapsulates. Sorry. SHDocVw is part of IE, it does not host IE. See this MSDN article for the IE architecture.

Answer 2

One possibility is to skip the web browser control completely and just start a new process running the browser that you do want. Here is a basic and simple example of how you would launch a firefox browser:

Dim p As New Process()
p.StartInfo.FileName = "firefox.exe" 
p.StartInfo.Arguments = "http://stackoverflow.com" 
p.Start()

Answer 3

There is a active x control for FireFox, so you could encapsulate that as well. Its not clear how well the XULRunners active x control supports IWebBrowser2 interface (note that xul runners says the active x is not complete.)

see:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XULRunner/What_XULRunner_Provides https://developer.mozilla.org/En/XULRunner http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/03/can-mozilla-be.html http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm

In short it will be a lot of work.