Question

Does anybody know how to click on a link in the WebBrowser control in a WinForms application and then have that link open in a new tab inside my TabControl?

I’ve been searching for months, seen many tutorials/articles/code samples but it seems as though nobody has ever tried this in C# before.

Any advice/samples are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Based on your comments, I understand that you want to trap the “Open In New Window” action for the WebBrowser control, and override the default behavior to open in a new tab inside your application instead.

To accomplish this reliably, you need to get at the NewWindow2 event, which exposes ppDisp (a settable pointer to the WebBrowser control that should open the new window).
All of the other potential hacked together solutions (such as obtaining the last link selected by the user before the OpenWindow event) are not optimal and are bound to fail in corner cases.

Luckily, there is a (relatively) simple way of accomplishing this while still using the System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser control as a base. All you need to do is extend the WebBrowser and intercept the NewWindow2 event while providing public access to the ActiveX Instance (for passing into ppDisp in new tabs). This has been done before, and Mauricio Rojas has an excellent example with a complete working class “ExtendedWebBrowser”:

http://blogs.artinsoft.net/mrojas/archive/2008/09/18/newwindow2-events-in-the-c-webbrowsercontrol.aspx

Once you have the ExtendedWebBrowser class, all you need to do is setup handlers for NewWindow2 and point ppDisp to a browser in a new tab. Here’s an example that I put together:

    private void InitializeBrowserEvents(ExtendedWebBrowser SourceBrowser)
    {
        SourceBrowser.NewWindow2 += new EventHandler<NewWindow2EventArgs>(SourceBrowser_NewWindow2);
    }

    void SourceBrowser_NewWindow2(object sender, NewWindow2EventArgs e)
    {

        TabPage NewTabPage = new TabPage()
        {
            Text = "Loading..."
        };

        ExtendedWebBrowser NewTabBrowser = new ExtendedWebBrowser()
        {
            Parent = NewTabPage,
            Dock = DockStyle.Fill,
            Tag = NewTabPage
        };

        e.PPDisp = NewTabBrowser.Application;
        InitializeBrowserEvents(NewTabBrowser);

        Tabs.TabPages.Add(NewTabPage);
        Tabs.SelectedTab = NewTabPage;

    }

    private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        InitializeBrowserEvents(InitialTabBrowser);

    }

(Assumes TabControl named “Tabs” and initial tab containing child control docked ExtendedWebBrowser named “InitialWebBrowser”)

Don’t forget to unregister the events when the tabs are closed!