One of the new controls in Silverlight 4 is a webbrowser control. The control lets you navigate to specified Uri’s and you could actually build your own Silverlight browser using the control.
But what is underneath the hood? Is it an Internet Explorer or does it use your default browser engine? Before finding the answer to this question I had a pretty good feeling about the result. To find out I constructed a very simple Silverlight application containing only the webbrowser control. I hardcoded the source of the control to http://www.b2knet.com/ – a website that can tell a little information about the browser that is used to navigate to the site.
On this computer Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0.7600.16385 is my default browser. From http://www.b2knet.com/ I got the following result:
Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer || Version: Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.3)
Trying to set my default browser to Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 did not change on the result found above.
You find the Silverlight application here.
by xamlgeek
thomas martinsen 