Google searches are leading me down a bunch of dead ends with this one.
I am developing an Excel add-in in VBA, and part of it involves the use of the WebBrowser control to display a (known) webpage inside a form and access its DOM components.
Unfortunately, this leaves me at the whim of the user's version of Internet Explorer.
For our actual webpages, we can use Chrome Frame support to allow IE users to see the page in the way we intend without worrying about their browser version, but the WebBrowser control does not see the browser plugins.
I have taken a look at WebKit.NET and GeckoFX. They sort of work, but unless I am completely missing something, they don't seem to have Javascript or CSS engines in them at all. Or (in the case of GeckoFX), they are using old engines. That makes them useless.
Is there any ActiveX control that I can embed in a VBA form which works like the WebBrowser control (with a similar-if-not-identical API), uses a different rendering engine that keeps up with the latest version of Mozilla/Chrome/Opera, and still supports Javascript and CSS correctly?
Thank you!
(Some edits based on the comments)
EDITED AGAIN: I found out from one answer below that I was looking at an outdated version of GeckoFX, but the newest version looks promising. But now I have a new related question: How do I include GeckoFX in VBA? Windows does not allow me to register it as a COM object. Do I have to build it myself from source somehow? Or what?
By default, Google Chrome and Firefox web browsers do not support ActiveX controls. However, there are workarounds to enable ActiveX controls and get the required functionality based on ActiveX controls. Google Chrome users can download IE Tab extension that acts as Internet Explorer emulator.
As the web has advanced to distributed and more secure technology stacks, ActiveX should naturally be deprecated. Based on important industry trends, NetDocuments will terminate support for Internet Explorer and ActiveX, effective August 31, 2020 (the “Effective Date”).
ActiveX is still supported as of Windows 10 through Internet Explorer 11, while ActiveX is not supported in their default web browser Microsoft Edge (which has a different, incompatible extension system, as it is based on Google's Chromium project).
Gecokfx supports Firefox up to 33.0
https://bitbucket.org/geckofx/geckofx/wiki/Version_lists
It supports both Javascript and CSS.
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