Multiple Internet Explorer versions side-by-side in one application

Question

in the MFC application I am working on, I need to have an Internet Explorer (we are using the component CHtmlView) displayed, currently we are able to change the rendering mode the IE works in by using the FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION registry keys. However that only allows us to change the rendering mode of all the CHtmlView instances in the application, plus to apply that change, we must restart the application.
The problem is, we would like to have more than one version of the IE displayed side-by-side in our application. I know that it is possible to get multiple IE versions on one computer, but I'm not sure, how to get them all in one application.
We have some ideas, how to solve this problem, but they are not really a trivial solutions, so I want to ask for your ideas. Anyway, here is what we've come up with:

1. Download the source code of the page, add the document compatibility tag , change all the addresses in the document to the absolute ones, and save this page to the disk. Then reload the page from the disc with the IE. This solution works only partially, because although it makes IE to use the correct rendering mode, the page fails to load some of the resources, because it is in the different location than the original - the addresses we had changed works well, but for example the JavaScript generated ones doesn't. And this solution is generally very messy, so we had dropped that.

2. Use multiple processes - each IE version would have it's own executable/dll library, we use the browser emulation feature on each executable, and then somehow glue this into one application (I admit, I have no idea how, as I've never used multiple processes with windows/MFC). But I don't know, if that solution would even work...

3. Create a proxy for our application, that will change the downloaded source code in a similar way as the solution 1 presents - it will add the document compatibility tag , to force the IE into the desired mode, but it can leave the addresses intact, as the IE would see the source as coming from the original location. This solution seems to me like the safest one, but like with the 2. solution, I don't know how to make a proxy layer for our application, and more importantly, how much time would it take.

So do you have any ideas on how else could this be solved? If the solution uses something other than CHtmlView, so be it, we can always change that. As for the IE versions, we would like to have, it would be nice to support IE6, but it is not necessary, the lowest required version is IE7.

Thanks ahead for your time, any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In the end I have solved this by using

our own proxy server (implemented using boost asio), and modifying the http request/response headers to force IE into the correct compatibility mode.

several executables with unique names, with the compatibility mode set in the registry . Each browser version ran in a separate process.

As it turned out, the proxy server solution didn't always work as expected. The multi-process solution did work as intended, but in the end, the emulated browsers didn't always work as the real browsers, and the whole solution wasn't 100% reliable.

I hope this will help someone in the future.