Knowledge Base

How To Develop with IE3 WebBrowser Control on an IE4 computer

Article ID: 183044

Article Last Modified on 5/11/2006

Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 128-Bit Edition
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 Service Pack 2
Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Standard Edition
Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Professional Edition
Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 32-Bit Enterprise Edition

This article was previously published under Q183044

SUMMARY

When you create an application that uses the WebBrowser control, the currently installed version of Internet Explorer (IE) is used. If you create a Visual Basic project with Internet Explorer 3.0 installed on your development computer, your project will use the IE3 WebBrowser control. When you upgrade to Internet Explorer 4.0, the newly created projects will use the IE4 WebBrowser control. Your existing projects still use the IE3 compatible version of the WebBrowser control. However, you are no longer able to create new projects with the IE3 WebBrowser control.

This article describes how to set up your development computer so that you can create either IE3 or IE4 WebBrowser-based applications.

Please be sure you test your application on a computer running IE3 only (as well as testing on a computer running IE4) to ensure that you are not unintentionally taking advantage of any Internet Explorer 4.0 features.

MORE INFORMATION

If you want create applications that use the IE3 WebBrowser control so they run on Computers that have IE3 or IE4 installed, we recommend developing on a computer with IE3 installed. If this is not possible, you can use information in this article to set up your IE4 development computer so that you can choose which version of the WebBrowser control you want to use.

To set up your IE4 development computer to allow selecting which version of WebBrowser control to use in your Visual Basic forms, follow these steps:

Open Notepad and copy the text below:

   REGEDIT4
   [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EAB22AC3-30C1-11CF-A7EB-
   0000C05BAE0B}\Control]

Save the file as IE3WebOC.reg somewhere on your system
From Windows Explorer, right-click Ie3weboc.reg and select Merge, or simply double-click the file.
Delete the Shdocvw.oca file, which will be re-created by Visual Basic. This file resides in the System32 directory on Windows NT systems and in the System directory on Windows 95 systems.

Now, you should be able to use the IE3 or IE4 WebBrowser control on your IE4 development computer. To test, start Visual Basic 5.0 and create a Stand- alone project. From Project Components, add "Microsoft Internet Controls." You will get two versions of the WebBrowser control in your toolbox. One will be named WebBrowser_V1 (IE3) and the other will be named WebBrowser (IE4).

REFERENCES

For additional information, please see the following article(s) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

162719 How To Use the WebBrowser Control from Visual Basic 5.0

155969 How To Distribute the WebBrowser Control

For more information about developing Web-based solutions for Microsoft Internet Explorer, visit the following Microsoft Web sites:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/

http://support.microsoft.com/iep

Additional query words: VBKBWeb kbhowto

Keywords: kbfaq kbhowto KB183044