WebBrowser.txt

Windows web browser component.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089645

Stratoscope 446 days ago | parent | favorite | on: CefSharp – Embedded Chromium for .NET

I've done a fair amount of work with CEF (the native version, not
CefSharp), Awesomium, Coherent UI, and the native WinForms WebBrowser
control.

If you are targeting Windows and don't need features that are specific
to Chromium, I recommend the WebBrowser control above the others,
because it will save you quite a bit of file size in your application,
along with less memory usage.

Unfortunately, the WebBrowser control defaults to an IE7 compatibility
mode, which is where it's gotten much of its bad reputation. However,
you can force it into IE11 mode, assuming that the user's machine does
have IE11 installed. (And if you are producing a Windows app,
customers who have refused to update their systems to IE11 are
probably customers not worth supporting.)

Oddly enough, there is no API to do this. You have to write a value to
the registry listing your .exe filename and the IE version you want to
use. But this value is in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, so you don't need
administrator privileges or a UAC prompt to do this.

WebBrowser also sends an IE7 UserAgent string by default, but you can
easily override that.

I posted the code for both of these tweaks in the MarkdownPad forum,
where I was encouraging the author to use the WebBrowser control
instead of Awesomium which the product currently uses:

http://forums.apricitysoftware.com/t/why-is-markdownpad-spaw...

(Friends at Awesomium, don't take offense! I just think WebBrowser is
a better match for MarkdownPad, since it doesn't need Chromium
features and IE11 compatibility would be plenty good for their needs.
They actually used the WebBrowser originally but switched to Awesomium
because the author didn't know how to force WebBrowser into IE11
mode!)

The problem I have with both Awesomium and Coherent UI, besides the
large file size, is that they are both stuck on old versions of
Chromium: IIRC Coherent is somewhere around Chromium 31 and Awesomium
is in the upper 20's. (Sounds like there is a new version coming out
though.) CEF keeps much more up to date on the Chromium versions; not
sure about CefSharp.

Coherent has nice integrations for Unity and Unreal Engine, including
hardware acceleration, which was a real problem when I tried to
integrate CEF into Unity a year ago. (This has no doubt been resolved
by now, but at the time Chromium was going through a restructuring of
the hardware rendering pipeline and CEF just bailed out on it for a
while.)

I did a fun little project with Awesomium (originally for the late
great OnLive) that composited multiple WebViews transparently on top
of each other so each one ran in its own thread. Kind of like stacking
transparent iframes but without the single-thread limitation:

https://github.com/geary/awestack