I've had an idea for a .Net control I'd really like to see built, so I think I'm going to give it a go...

The Story
.Net Developers often have a need to render HTML within their application - Mircrosoft have created the WebBrowser .Net control - an ActiveX wrapper so users can make use of the goodies within MSHTML within their application.

The Pain
Many users prefer Firefox. But what of our .Net applications? Are we to force our users to use Internet Explorer within our applications?
There's another problem here - the WebBrowser control shares the settings and preferences of the installed Internet Explorer version. In fact, it shares everything, so I'm running IE 7b2 right now, so are all the apps I that make use of the Internet Explorer control - interestingly McAfee use it, and their software was incompatible with IE7 - so I couldn't even uninstall it.

The Fix
Using Adam Lock's Mozilla ActiveX Project and my experience while using this control for CSSVista, I want to build a .Net WebBrowser control that will do the following:

- Check to see if Firefox is the default browser when deploying to a machine, if it is, use Firefox in place of Internet Explorer within the .Net application.
- The FirefoxBrowser will have it's own settings and preferences, these can modified via a preferences dialog similar to that found in Firefox, except that it must allow derived classes to adjust the interface and controls within.
- Support more advanced Firefox features that are currently not supported by the Mozilla ActiveX Project such as Plug-in management, authentication, etc.
- Allow both instances of Internet Explorer and Firefox to co-exist along side each other just as they do in CSSVista.

The end result should be a drop-in component for developers, with no difference in implementation to that seen when using the WebBrowser control. But giving the end user a much better experience.

Most of this component is being built as part of CSSVista - but I intend to release the source code for this component when it's ready.

FirefoxBrowser Control