

This applies whether you’re using the Web Browser control in a WPF application, a WinForms app, or FoxPro application using the ActiveX control.

This is because the original versions of the ActiveX control used this mode and for backwards compatibility the Control continues this outdated and very HTML5 unfriendly default. Even though we're now up to IE 11 and a reasonably HTML5 compatible browser, the Web Browser Control always uses the IE 7 rendering engine by default. The Web Browser Control allows for an effective way to display HTML in your applications in a way that blends in and becomes part of your application.īut there's a snag: The Web Browser Control is - by default - perpetually stuck in IE 7 rendering mode. HTML is easy to generate, generally re-usable, and easily extensible and distributable. Even in desktop applications, is often way easier than using labels or edit boxes or even some of the WPF text containers. Whether you're just rendering document content, or you're interacting with rich interactive content, HTML happens to be one of the most common document formats to display or interact with and it makes a wonderful addition to conventional forms based UI. For example Markdown Monster, Help Builder and WebSurge rely heavily on the Web Browser Control to render their document centric or even rich interactive UI (in the case of Markdown Monster which hosts an HTML editor). I use the Internet Explorer Web Browser Control in a lot of my desktop applications to display document content. Updated Aug 26th, 2016 - the original was published in May 2011
