Differences between WPF Frame and WebBrowser controls.

Question

I'm working on a web-enabled media center which will be able to load video feeds into a gallery style view. (like Cooliris)

Rather than loading thumbnail images of each video, I plan to load the actual video so it can be played in-place and/or popped out to fullscreen.

This means I need to host a bunch of flash-player instances 'inside' my WPF Page.

Is there any advantage to using a Frame control rather than an SP1 WebBrowser control? I know that, while the WebBrowser is technically a wrapped Windows Forms control and the Frame control is 'native' wpf, even the Frame control uses a win32 MS.Internal.Controls.WebBrowser to show content.

Given this fact, are the two controls roughly equivalent, especially as performance is concerned?

Answer 1

The big difference is that Frame can host WPF or HTML content. How it does this is by piping the content to either WPF or IE, so it's not doing any rendering itself and WPF never renders the HTML natively. So if you have (or may have in the future) a need to seamlessly host WPF or HTML content in the same control then Frame is definitely what you want. That said, I don't know of a downside to using Frame so that's what I use even if it's exclusively for HTML.