This works pretty well, but we are running into a few problems:
- people have a wide variety of IE versions
- some people have Javascript turned off
- security settings are getting more and more restrictive
And in the long run I'd like to run on Mac and Linux which don't have IE built in for some reason :-)
So I've been thinking about using another browser component that we can have better control over. Initially I was looking at Gecko (the Mozilla Firefox engine). There's even a Mozilla ActiveX control with the same interface as IE, but it requires registry changes which isn't always feasible for our clients. I tried to find a workaround for the registry issue but couldn't get it working (and no one on Stack Overflow had an answer).
The recent trend seems to be to use WebKit - like in Safari, Chrome, Google Earth, etc. I found the Chromium Embedded project that seems like it would do the trick.
As a first step, I thought I should try to build the example application.Four hours later I think I have achieved this. Since it wasn't easy, I thought I'd recount the saga in case it might help someone else.
First, the standard build environment seems to be Visual Studio C++ 2005. I had various other version installed but not that one. Unfortunately, it's been replaced by VS 2008 which I tried building with, but it gave a lot of errors. (Although maybe the fixes below would have worked?)
A Stack Overflow post led me to someone's page with links to old versions. When I installed, I got compatibility warnings which suggested some updates. I downloaded the updates but when I tried to install it failed, saying the software wasn't installed. (Even though I could run it.) Instead, I was able to get the updates by running Windows Update.
When I tried to build it couldn't find atlbase.h That's because Visual Studio Express (the free version) doesn't come with the Windows SDK. I already had a Windows Server 2003 SDK installed so I updated Tools - Options to point to it.
But I still got errors about shlwapi.lib missing. It turns out this is part of "Microsoft Web Workshop (IE) SDK", an optional part of the SDK. So I tracked down the right SDK installer and installed it.
Next, I had to patch atlbase.h and atlwin.h as explained in a Code Project post. This cleaned up a bunch more errors. But I was still getting errors about _Module which I fixed based on yet another post.
Then I got errors that I was missing opengl32.lib which stumped me for a while till I found someone else with a similar problem, and ended up at instructions for adding the SDK libraries to Visual Studio. Since you don't actually need opengl32.lib, I'm not sure why the project specifies it.
Initially the Debug version built. It ran, but it had a bad tendency to crash. The Release version seems to be fine.
Another issue is that it's big, about 20mb for the required dll's. I guess that's not that big these days, but it's still a fair size to deploy over the internet.
This all seems way harder than it should be. I realize it's Windows and Visual Studio and C++ and open source, but still! Maybe I've been spoiled by working with Java lately. Java does have benefits.
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