Question

In Windows, is there a native way to display PDF files and simple websites?

On Mac, both tasks are very simple:

[[PDFView ...] setDocument:[PDFDocument ...]];

[[[WebView ...] mainFrame] loadRequest:[NSURLRequest ...]];

Is there anything comparable on Windows? From which version?

Answer 1

There is nothing native in Windows for embedding a PDF document in an application. You would have to host a third-party ActiveX/COM container, such as from Adobe Acrobat, to handle that.

For a webpage, you can host Internet Explorer’s WebBrowser control in your app. Some third-party browsers, like Mozilla and FireFox, also support hosting in apps.

Or, you could use the ShellExecute() function to open a given document/url in its default external application instead of hosting it inside of your own app.