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So I am trying to get started developing Office 365 Add-ins (previously Apps for Office), and I was wondering what browser or browser engine Office uses when it renders your app. I tried using JavaScript's navigator.appCodeName and navigator.appName, but due to the problem described here renders that method useless. What browser or engine do Office Add-ins use to render apps?

Community
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James Parsons
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It depends on where Office is being used. If it's on Windows Desktop, Office Add-ins use an Internet Explorer to load the hosted webpage in Office. For iOS, it will rely on the native WebView control. If on Office Online, it will use a sandboxed iframe, in which ever browser you open Office Online with.

If you're trying to determine the browser Office is running in, I believe sniffing the user agent string will work for you.

Keyur Patel - MSFT
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    Is there a chance we can see Edge instead of IE anytime soon in the desktop apps? – James Parsons Jan 05 '16 at 17:03
  • Hi James - Currently, the team is working on other priorities at the moment but I could see this being on our backlog, especially if rendering Edge leads to better performance on Windows 10 machines. Although, we would still need to use IE for previous Windows versions. – Keyur Patel - MSFT Jan 11 '16 at 04:36
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    I've just hit a css issue where a style works in every browser, and in office online (using IE), but not in Office365 locally. Bizarre. – JsAndDotNet May 19 '16 at 08:44
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    We are now in the bizarre situation where Word on Windows is actually the most difficult platform to develop add-ins for because it runs add-ins in IE11, which doesn't support ES6 – Fergie Aug 31 '17 at 14:39
  • @KeyurPatel-MSFT Can you tell us what browser is used in Office Add-ins on Mac? This is user agent string reported in an add in in Excel for Mac (16): `Netscape 5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_3) AppleWebKit/604.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) -?` – Sk606 Feb 14 '18 at 17:56
  • For mac, it uses WebKit, which is the web browser engine used by Safari. – Keyur Patel - MSFT Mar 31 '18 at 01:38
  • As of the 1903 update it uses Edge. The only issue I have is that [now it is using Edge, I cannot debug with F12Cooser](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56121976/cannot-debug-add-in-using-f12chooser-in-1903). – Michael Coxon May 14 '19 at 01:53