Thursday 19 April 2012

Alternatives to IE WebBrowser Control in .NET


UPDATE (Jun/13): see When the best way to automate Chrome is to use ... Chrome (with examples on Google search, direct AngularJS scope manipulation and ChromeDriver javascript access) for a way to use the the actual chrome window inside a .NET process

UPDATE (Jan/13): See PoC - Selenium - Gui with 3 Hijacked Browser Windows.h2 post for a much better and powerful way to consume Chrome (and IE and Firefox) in another process


UPDATE (Jun/12): After this post was written I was able to use CefSharp to consume Chrome natively in C#:


I did some research on some alternatives to IE's WebBrowser control and here are some interesting options:

  • CefSharp ...Net binding for the Chromium Embedded Framework...
  • Berkelium ...provides off-screen browser rendering via Google's open source Chromium web browser... 
  • berkelium-sharp ...Managed wrapper for the Berkelium embedded browser library.. 
  • open-webkit-sharp ...GTLite Navigator An open-source WebKit web browser...
  • Chromium ...open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser and Google Chrome OS...
  • Awesomium - ...Web Browser Framework ... (Commercial and Indie License) 
  • Mono WebBrowser
Here are some StackOverflow threads: