Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because they control the whole stack. FWIW, I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed. To give you a basic idea. I'm running the control embedded and the WebView2 control consumes about 60MB after navigating to my own -mostly text- website. Browsing within that control to the page of the…
> I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed. To what extent are you maintaining compatibility? The old mshtml provides com bindings for pretty much everything. I'd be interested to see what you have if you end up releasing the code. I would love for the old Trident / mshtml / edgehtml engines…
With mshtml you could directly access the DOM and do pretty much anything in there via its interface.
With WebView2 there is no direct DOM access. You have access to what is running in the browser, but it is all via javascript. I'm building a bit on top now to get some basics to the developer without getting their hands dirty in javascript, but for Microsoft clearly the idea is to use javascript to manage the DOM.
re. releasing the code. Sorry, it will be a commercial undertaking. I will release the control, but it won't be free.