Question

I have a C# application that has a webbrowser and need to be able to completely disable it at times. What is the best method of doing this?

I was thinking about creating a transparent panel to put over the webbrowser when needed, but am not sure if this is the best approach. I also noticed that C# doesn’t easily allow making a panel transparent.

Edit: To clarify what I mean by disable…I don’t want to allow the user to be able to click or change\edit anything in the webbrowser.

Answer 1

Strangely the WebBrowser control doesn’t have an Enabled property as you might expect it to. You can set the AllowNavigation property to false which will stop the user clicking on links.

Turns out it does have an Enabled property, inherited from Control. But you have to explicitly cast it to Control to access it:

((Control)webBrowser1).Enabled = false; 

You should be aware though that setting Enabled completely disables any user interaction with the WebBrowser control. That includes the scroll bar, so once you set Enabled to false the user can’t even scroll the web page in the control.

If that was more than you wanted then setting the AllowNavigation property to false will stop the user clicking on links but still allow them to scroll the page. You’d need to check though that it also stops Javascript onclick events from firing.

If you wanted to stop any events from firing in the page you could probably achieve that will some DOM work from the WebForms code into the WebBrowser control. You also probably need to start disabling input controls within the WebBrowser. It all depends how disabled you want it.