Geckofx Browser in Winform Application

Bored with IE browser in your winform application ? Want to do everything as you doing in your Firefox or Chrome Browser ?

Play with automation ? Then here is your choice .

Introduction:

 GeckoFX is a Windows Forms control written in clean, commented C# that embeds the Mozilla Gecko browser control in any Windows Forms Application. It also contains a simple class model providing access to the HTML and CSS DOM.

GeckoFX was originally created by Andrew Young for the fast-growing visual CSS editor, Stylizer. It is now released as open-source under the Mozilla Public License. 

You can download it here :  Geckofx 22.0
And the supporting file Xulrunner here :  Xulrunner Files

Hope you have downloaded above two files. Here our journey going to start.

Create your winform application in visual studio and do the following:

right click the toolbox -> Choose items -> Browse the "Geckofx-winforms.dll" and click "yes" for “Load it anyway”.

Now in toolbox you can find "GeckoWebBrowser"

Just drag that GeckoWebBrowser to the form and add the tools as displayed in the following picture.

 So now you ready to do some interesting stuff with the browser.

The first step we need to set path for xulrunner which initialize the language package and basic dll files which are used to run Geckofx browser.

Path initialization should be earlier when project runs. So declare it In form’s constructor.

        public Form1()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

            Gecko.Xpcom.Initialize(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory + "xulrunner");

        }

Initially geckobrowser does not support some memory consuming process like  playing videos , if you want to play just add the following code in constructor:

     Gecko.GeckoPreferences.Default["extensions.blocklist.enabled"] = false;

Then add the following code for the added tools,

        private void reloadButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            geckoWebBrowser1.Reload();

        }

        private void backButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            geckoWebBrowser1.GoBack();

        }

        private void forwardButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            geckoWebBrowser1.GoForward();

        }

        privatevoid stopButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            geckoWebBrowser1.Stop();

        }

        privatevoid textBox1_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)

        {

           if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Enter)

            {

                geckoWebBrowser1.Navigate(textBox1.Text);

            }

        }

And shall we add some external features to browser functionality.

        private void geckoWebBrowser1_StatusTextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            label1.Text = geckoWebBrowser1.StatusText;

        }

        private void geckoWebBrowser1_Navigating(object sender, GeckoNavigatingEventArgs e)

        {

            textBox1.Text = geckoWebBrowser1.Url.AbsoluteUri;

        }

        private void geckoWebBrowser1_Navigated(object sender, GeckoNavigatedEventArgse)

        {

            textBox1.Text = geckoWebBrowser1.Url.AbsoluteUri;

        }

Following code will remove the cookies :

      for (int c = 0; c < geckoWebBrowser1.Document.Cookie.Length; c++)

        {

            nsICookieManager CookieMan;

            CookieMan = Xpcom.GetService<nsICookieManager>("@mozilla.org/cookiemanager;1");

            CookieMan = Xpcom.QueryInterface<nsICookieManager>(CookieMan);

            CookieMan.RemoveAll();

        }

And the additional property of geckobrowser is we can change the proxy and UserAgents.

            Gecko.GeckoPreferences.User["network.proxy.http"] = "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx";

            Gecko.GeckoPreferences.User["network.proxy.http_port"] = xxxx;

            Gecko.GeckoPreferences.User["network.proxy.type"] = 1;

Automation With Geckofx: 

Following code will explain about the automation in geckobrowser.  Shall we search in google with automation,

Add another button and name it as “autosearch” and write the following code.

        private void autosearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            GeckoInputElement search =               new GeckoInputElement(geckoWebBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByName("q")[0].DomObject);

           GeckoInputElement button =     new GeckoInputElement(geckoWebBrowser1.Document.GetElementsByName("btnG")[0].DomObject);

            search.focus();

            search.Value = "Master Blaster Sachin";

            button.Click();

        }

Hope you enjoyed this ..!