Question

I have a drop down list , in which i have list of browsers such as “Firefox,chrome,IE “,
Now i want that when i run my application and select from the drop down the browser my application should run in that particular selected browser,can anyone help me in this as i have spend a lot of time searching on internet and haven’t found any result so far. i am using c#.NET
thanks for your support.

Answer 1

You can look in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet to see the registered browsers that are installed (on my machine, IE, Firefox, Chrome and Opera all show up).

The default value under each browser’s subkey is its name. Then you can look under the subkey shell\open\command to get the executable to run.

Here’s some example code I wrote:

   private class Browser {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public string Exe { get; set; }
        public override string ToString() {
            return Name;
        }
    }

    private List<Browser> Browsers;

    private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        Browsers = new List<Browser>();
        const string browserListKey = @"SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet";
        using (var clients = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(browserListKey)) {
            foreach (var client in clients.GetSubKeyNames()) {
                using (var clientKey = clients.OpenSubKey(client)) {
                    string name = (string)clientKey.GetValue(string.Empty);
                    using (var commandKey = clientKey.OpenSubKey(@"shell\open\command")) {
                        string exe = (string)commandKey.GetValue(string.Empty);
                        Browsers.Add(new Browser() { Name = name, Exe = exe });
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        comboBox1.DataSource = Browsers;
    }

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        string exe = ((Browser)comboBox1.SelectedItem).Exe;
        Process.Start(exe);
    }