For those of you that have tried to dynamically generate content for the Modern Web Browser control a warning that sadly this new control is simply unreliable and far inferior to its predecessor!

You can look and the YouTube video (see below) I took which illustrates the issue, but basically, I can open a form and have the Modern Web Browser control render properly, close the form and then try again and get nothing but a blank screen.

So the exact same form, which has no changes in any shape or form, will render once and then never render again until the database is closed or a Compact and Repair is performed. The dynamically generated HTML never changes, but the control will only render it the 1st time and subsequent calls renders nothing and if you inspect you find an “Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED” error. How could the ‘resources’, in this case JS libraries, be accessible initially, but not on any subsequent calls?!

For anyone wondering this occurred running the latest version of Access, Version 2312 (Build 17126.20132 Click-to-Run) 32-bit, and no, I didn’t go reverting my build to see if this was a long standing issue or a new regression (that’s what Microsoft calls BUGs).

As things stand now, with Microsoft Access’ Modern Web Browser control, dynamic content generation is not reliable and I’d advise you stay away from it.  For experimentation, maybe, but for Production, FORGET IT!

Instead save the dynamically generated HTML to a file on the hard drive and then navigate to it.  It is a waste of I/O operations, but at least that approach works reliably.

It is sad to see how poorly the ‘new’ Modern Web Browser control performs when it can’t even do what we could easily do under the old IE Web Browser control! It is very much a hit or miss control.