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OPTIONS FOR BUILDING A WEB BROWSER

DELPHI COMPONENTS

Delphi 2 (Professional version and upwards) and Delphi 3 have internet components as part of the supplied VCL. D4 and D5 have a similar provision.

You can build a working browser from Delphi 3's supplied example template within the space of a few minutes. However, you need a particular version of the Microsoft Internet controls to run the browser; they are integrated with Delphi, but are difficult to install on a machine which doesn't have D3, and are hard to locate and install from external sources. There's also (I think) no support for Javascript, etc.

There are other third-party components available, of which several are free and of good quality. I've not looked into them a great deal, but I get the impression that they need quite a lot of work to fit together into a functional browser.

The best places to look for components like these if you want to try them are:

The Delphi Super Page on http://delphi.icm.edu.pl/, and
Torry's Delphi Pages on http://www.torry.net

Each of these sites has several mirrors if you need a site which is nearer to you.

I don't know enough about Visual Basic or the various flavours of C++ to know if there are similar components in those languages.


USING INTERNET EXPLORER

The components of Microsoft's Internet Explorer have the ability to be reused in third-party applications. The advantages of this are that the programming of such an application is relatively straightforward, that IE is free and easily available, and that if you have Windows 98 or higher, it is on your system anyway. The disadvantage for some folks is that it's Microsoft's Internet Explorer... a standpoint with which I have sympathy but don't espouse totally. I've taken the view that, for an amateur/hobbyist Delphi programmer, the advantages of using IE outweigh the disadvantages, and that the project that follows will be IE-based.

So, on to the next page, where we start to build a Delphi / IE-based web browser.

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