Extending the cef renderer.

[krum]

Hello, I am looking for advice on the best method to add an ie renderer to cef.

I had a few streams of thought on this.
1) ppapi plugin, my worry is that ppapi will be phased out, what is the plan for it?
2) ietabhelper.exe style external program (not even sure how this one works, but I would love to know some basics on loading external exe in my current browser)
3) other method cef has direct support to do?

My ultimate goal is to allow for any rendering via dll, then it just works and all of the logic to hook into events would be via cef events.

I really just need a bit of direction and best practices for something like this.

Thanks!

[krum]

This answers my question on the first 1!

https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/movin ... -apps.html
- Yes PPAPI is going to be removed, so I suppose I would not use that option.

So I guess the ask is, can I hook into the renderer, so let chrome get the files and make any calls, but render with my custom code?

I suppose I may just have to go with a generic wrapper per browser then load them individually and separately, unless anyone here has info on how chrome and ietabhelper.exe work together. I am not sure how they run an exe in chrome or what but I want to learn.

Thanks,

[magreenblatt]

What do you mean by "add an ie renderer to cef"? Do you mean emulate IE rendering inside of Chromium? Or do you mean replace the Chromium window with an IE window? Or something else?

[krum]

I would like to render IE inside of Chrome much like "IE tab" extension does.

it uses an ietabhelper.exe to do it (somehow), I have a browser for IE working using mshtml, I was curious if I could make chromium have an IE window.
My goal is to have compatibility for awful apps which don't work with chrome/newer browsers (mostly for activeX support)

Ideally I would like chrome to make the requests for data and send it to IE to render (passing the results from chrome to IE), but I have no idea if this is even possible. So I was trying to figure out how IE tab does it, and I hit a dead end.

so if I could just get some keywords to search or methods I could try, that would help a ton or even a guess at how IE tab does it.

I am happy to struggle and try to figure things out myself, I am just lost at what is possible/easiest way to achieve this.

[magreenblatt]

Sorry, I don't know the details of the "IE tab" extension. I suggest browsing the IWebBrowser2/MSHTML documentation to see what's possible. If you can intercept network requests then it should be relatively easy to redirect them through CEF. If you're replacing the complete browser window I would suggest just hiding the CEF window and showing the IE window instead. If you're looking to replace a sub-frame or iframe then it will get more complicated.

[krum]

I was thinking of it being in an iframe or subframe, but if you think that is complicated, I don't think I stand a chance

I may be making this more complicated than it needs to be.

I may just make a wrapper with generic methods that can be implemeted for any browser I want to implement (one for CEF43, one for Latest CEF, one for MSHTML, one for Gecko...etc)

I wonder if something like that exists anywhere...off to the internet!

Thanks for responding to my nonsenese

[ndesktop]

"Display web pages using IE within Chrome."
IE Tab really hosts IE inside Chrome. So you don't want to emulate IE - I don't think this is even possible inside Chrome, since things like ActiveX do not even exists.
ietabhelper.exe is a host for embedded IE inside a Chrome page; Chrome does not know ActiveX (and mostly not even IE specific COM), so it needs a some form of container to run. When NPAPI was available, this could be emulated, probably, by a some form of MIME handler, then NP(N)_... took care of embedding IE and passing content between chrome and IE hosted (or directly intercepting the navigation and passing it as-is to the hosted IE).
I don't know how ietabhelper.exe works, I assume is a PPAPI executable.

[rado]

I would suggest just hiding the CEF window and showing the IE window instead.

I'd suggest the same. I'm not sure what benefit it would give to use CEF for network requests, but it should be possible. You can intercepr IE's requests using this https://github.com/salsita/passthruapp