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Webbrowser Control without IE

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Houston McClung

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Apr 1, 2001, 1:14:01 PM4/1/01
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Hi all,

Please forgive me for the cross-post.

I'm working on a web-browser program, which uses the IE WebBrowser control.
It may be used by person's who do not have IE installed on their systems.
All the registry entries - as far as I know - have been provided for by my
program, as well as a fav's folder and history cache.

What else, if anything, needs to be accounted for for the control to work
properly on a comp without IE. (except for regsvr32 and all that), or will
it work properly. I don't want the users of the program to have to install
IE before installing this program ... that would be ridiculous.

So, do I have any chance of this working? And would anyone (without
Internet Explorer) be willing to do a beta-test?

Thanks In Advance,
Houston McClung III


Douglas Marquardt

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Apr 1, 2001, 2:01:22 PM4/1/01
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Hi Houston:

> I'm working on a web-browser program, which uses the IE WebBrowser
control.
> It may be used by person's who do not have IE installed on their systems

AFIK, that is against licencing -- IE must be installed on the machine for
you to use the control.

Doug.

MikeD

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Apr 1, 2001, 2:30:34 PM4/1/01
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Internet Explorer MUST be installed to use the WebBrowser control. There
are simply no ifs, ands, or buts about it. How can you expect to use IE
functionality if IE is not installed?

If users will not have IE already installed, you'll need to get a license
from Microsoft to distribute IE with your program, or you can instruct your
users to download IE directly from MS prior to installing/using your
program. Those are your ONLY 2 choices if you want to use the WebBrowser
control. Even the WebBrowser control itself (shdocvw.dll, a file that is a
core component of IE) is NOT redistributable.

On a personal note, it's not ridiculous. Consider how tightly IE is tied to
Windows and the problems there would be if MS did not control distribution
of IE and its components as they do. It would be a nightmare.

Mike

"Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com> wrote in message
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Kevin Williamson

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Apr 2, 2001, 2:33:06 PM4/2/01
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As the other two have stated, you cannot use IE functionality without IE
being installed. And if your users (or you) think that using all of the
functionality of IE without having to install IE is ridiculous, maybe they
(you) need to rethink what they are doing.

Do your users have any web browser (Netscape) installed? If so, you can
just use the ShellExecute API per KB article Q224816.

So, knowing that your users have to have IE installed (if for nothing other
than licensing issues) keep in mind that you also cannot just download the
installation package for IE from the MS website and include it on your CD.
That also is against licensing agreements. But you can obtain the IEAK
(Internet Explorer Administration Kit) that will allow you to create a
custom IE installation package for your users. Go to
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ieak/en/default.asp for information about
the IEAK.

Kevin

--------------------
| Reply-To: "Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com>
| From: "Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com>
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Mark Meyers

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Apr 2, 2001, 5:55:52 PM4/2/01
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Isn't IE always installed? I thought you could only de-install the icon on
the desktop.

"Douglas Marquardt" <no_...@dummy.com> wrote in message
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Igor Tandetnik

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Apr 2, 2001, 6:10:16 PM4/2/01
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Good old Win95 doesn't have it installed by default, or it is optional,
don't remember which.
--
With best wishes,
Igor Tandetnik

"Mark Meyers" <m...@ipass.net> wrote in message
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Mark Meyers

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Apr 2, 2001, 7:11:04 PM4/2/01
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That was a really good operating system.

"Igor Tandetnik" <itand...@whenu.com> wrote in message
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Houston McClung

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Apr 2, 2001, 11:23:39 PM4/2/01
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Thanks guys. I really appreciate the advice. I didn't know there could be
a licensing issue. Let me ask one more thing about it ... on a similiar
note, are there any licensing issues involved with distributing a component
with the executable, like if the setup wizard adds mscomctl32.ocx or
something like that to the setup.exe, or to a setup.zip (if for whatever
reason I'd need to do it), file?

"Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com> wrote in message
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Kevin Williamson

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Apr 3, 2001, 10:26:06 AM4/3/01
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The Package and Deployment Wizard will check the redist.txt file. If it
adds a component to a package you are generally ok to distribute it.

Alternatively you could check the redist.txt file yourself for files you
can distribute.

Kevin

--------------------
| Reply-To: "Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com>
| From: "Houston McClung" <tachyon-...@home.com>
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| Subject: Re: Webbrowser Control without IE
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