I just wanted to state that I most probably won’t be pursuing any more development using the new ‘Modern’ Web Browser control for a little while.

I’ve:

• shown you all the basics
  
  

  Everything You Never Wanted to Know About the Access Modern Web Browser Control

  So, we have a new ‘Modern’ Web Browser control, some people have also referred to it as the Edge Web Browser control! Well that is if you are running MS365 and using the BETA or Current Update Channels running build 16.0.16327.20214 or greater. I thought, I would start documenting the new ‘Modern’ Web Browser control,…

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• shown how you can even perform more advanced automation
  
  Advanced Automation With The New Access Modern Web Browser Control

  In my previous posting on the subject: I demonstrated a couple times how to extract specific items from a active web page. This is done by using the RetrieveJavascriptValue method to execute the specified JavaScript command and we do this over, and over, and over… That said, this is no way to do proper parsing.…

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• provided a couple demos
  • merge/split PDFs
    
    Access Modern Web Browser Control - Merging PDFs

    Have you ever wanted to merge PDFs using VBA and not wanted to use ActiveX controls, 3rd party dlls, … Now that we have a new Modern Web Browser control:   we can finally do what has been so easy to do via the web for over a decade now!  That’s right, we can employ…

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    Access Modern Web Browser Control – Splitting PDFs

    As promised in my previous post regarding merging PDFs together using the new Access Modern Web Browser control: This post is about splitting/extracting a set of pages from a PDF.  
  • webcam automation and I do hope that helps a few of you out there
    
    

    Access Modern Web Browser Control – Webcam

    So you’ve seen that recently I’ve been playing around with the new Modern ‘Edge’/’WebView2’ Web Browser control that recently got added to Access MS365. and several more. And, in my previous post, I demonstrated how easy it was to save a base64 html image: well today, I’m going to implement that base64 code so we…

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That said, sadly, I had several other demos planned and have hit walls on all of them as the new control does not support some JavaScript code (createObjectURL for instance – which works fine in Edge itself OR something as simple as document.location.href = …) or because of the loss of the Object.Document I can no longer automate things like I could do so easily with the old browser control. So until such time that Microsoft provides us with a fix, I simply cannot move forward with any of them. So more and more, I’m learning the the Access Modern Web Browser control does not equal Edge. It may approach it, but it certainly is not the same thing and there are stark differences and limitations. (for anyone wondering, this and much more has all been provided to Microsoft, so they are aware of it all)

Please, don’t get me wrong, the new control has some very nice benefits and solves some serious issues we had with the old control, but sadly it also appears to have some serious limitations that truly impact advance automation use cases and even plain and simple everyday web surfing (I’m referring to Trusted Domains, not allowing mixed content sources, not fully supporting JS, …)!

For me, because of the limitation imposed by Microsoft, the Modern Web Browser control is in fact a Modern Web Page Viewer control and NOT a Web Browser control unlike its predecessor which was a proper Web Browser control.

So enjoy the new control to access the web if it meets your needs, but at this point in time I’m taking option 2 from my original post on the matter and going to wait and see if Microsoft fixes things (I doubt they will though, prove me wrong Microsoft!) before investing more time and energies into working with the control any further. It’s still been a fun ride figuring all of this out.