Silverlight desktop browser?

Question

Is it possible to build a silverlight desktop web browser?

(just for fun, to see if it works etc) :)

Answer 1

I don't see why not.

With Silverlight 4 you can build a full trust application utilising a Web Browser Control (Source).

There's more details on the WebBrowser Class on the MSDN.

Hosts HTML content within the Silverlight plug-in.

Answer 2

Yes you can. Using WebBrowser control is not fun and defeats the purpose of writing a browser. Basically you would have to load raw html and parse it into DOM-like data structure. Next you'd have to use Silverlight visual elements and layouts to render html page as close as possible to the way real browsers do it.

You're likely to run into Silverlight limitations in process and creating browser compatible with CSS3 would require huge amount of work, so while in theory it should be possible I'd just stick to that knowledge and not try to actually do it.