Playing around with the GeckoFX web browser control

Have been playing around with GeckoFX as an embedded browser control replacement for MS's IE control. MS's IE control lacks any HTML5 support and we'd really like to be able to take advantage of some of the cool drag & drop features, such as those used here. Much to my surprise, using features like this allows us to do drag & drop of objects between web applications and our custom WPF/WinForm apps. Extremely cool.

I have also had a quick look at WPF Chromium and a super quick glance at WebKit .NET. I plan to take a closer look at them soon, but for the moment, here are the things I like best about GeckoFX:

• Drag & drop works within the browser, and to external apps (in the quick look I've taken, I've been unable to do this with WPF Chromium


• Windows Auth appears to work. This is vital to what we're doing at work, since this is how all our apps are secured. If the other options don't support this, then they're not contenders at all.


• Although I haven't played with it yet, using GeckoFX I imagine we can use GreaseMonkey to help integrate web applications with our desktop environment in ways we may not have been able to do, especially for 3rd party products that otherwise wouldn't allow such a high degree of customisation.


• Silverlight runs very happily.

The only thing I really wish is that it was a true WPF control, rather than WinForms. Since most of our development is WPF, we have to use the WinForms integration, which is OK, but causes some graphical issues (such as the web control always rendering over the top of the WPF content - note that the IE control has these problems too.) WPF Chromium does not have this problem, and really allows some seriously cool graphical effects.