The built-in preview plugins are good enough for me most of the time, but there's one quirk in particular that drives me nuts. The default "ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web" plugin shows me HTML files fairly well, but the fact that the underlying Internet Exploder code doesn't respect my system browser settings in the slightest, insisting on opening Internet Exploder for any link clicked, is increasingly painful.
Let's face it: IE is a bug, not a feature. It's time for a better HTML preview. So I have to ask: is there an alternate HTML viewer? I know I can configure it for "Windows Mail HTML" instead, but that's no better. Thanks in advance.
Not currently, that I’m aware of at least. For some reason Microsoft seem to have forgotten to make an Edge preview handler, and no other browsers other than IE (ancient now) and the new Edge Chromium support embedding in other applications.
Fitefox lets you build and ship your own independent copy of all of their code, but has no way to use the browser already installed on a system like IE and Edge Chromium do.
We don’t want to get into the business of having to maintain, secure and update our own separate web browser.
Perhaps I don't understand. As it is, you're leveraging interfaces that let you instantiate the plugin, which itself is then leveraging interfaces that let it render HTML content using IE. That's what you'd have to do to leverage Chromium instead, and I thought that's what Firefox makes possible via the interfaces I mentioned. I don't see the difference, other than IE being a bug not a feature.
The "leveraging interfaces" thing refers to code already installed on the users' system in the form of a standalone application (Edge in this case). Keeping Edge up to date is the users' responsibilty (which Windows normally takes care of as part of the usual update process).
With Firefox, we would literally have to ship the Firefox code as part of Opus, and making sure it was kept updated (especially for security fixes) would be our responsibility.