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I'm working on a web app that's embedded within an HTA. Is it possible to enable browser toolbars so i can enable utilities like Development Toolbar, or IE8's built in Developer Tools?

I'm trying to do some firebug type things without using firebug or firebug lite and based on my googling it seems like it might not be possible!

Thank you!

Mario Zigliotto
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3 Answers3

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In short, no. HTA is a wrapper for the core trident engine.

It does not have browser support (like dev tools).

John Green
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  • Any other suggestions for digging into the UI/Styling of it? – Mario Zigliotto May 16 '11 at 22:53
  • Your best solution is to develop it as a standard Web app, using support from full IE or (even better) the tools inside of Webkit or Firefox. That way, you'll have a base that can be used in the future, especially if MS finally drops support for HTA. What functionality are you looking for that requires HTA? Running apps? If you can put that through an abstraction layer, then you can easily port your app to the technology du jour, rather than have a bunch of dead code around a tech that has an iffy future at best. – John Green May 17 '11 at 05:54
  • People have said HTA's were dead without any proof for over a decade, but I doubt they will go anywhere given their dead simple implementation and still prevalent use in corporate environments. Even still, the only dependency that would be lost if HTA's were deprecated would be the hta:application element which defines a small number of properties used to style the host window, options that wouldn't even need to be configurable by html markup. But this dependency could be recreated in a c# application with an IE com object in maybe 100 lines of code. Long live HTA's! :D – Marcus Pope Nov 02 '14 at 00:01
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One option would be to write your own C# forms application, embed an InternetExplorer object, and from there you can programmatically control the existence of the menu bar, toolbars, statusbar etc with some Boolean flags.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752084(v=vs.85).aspx

Another option would be to use the Visual Studio "Attach to process" feature and you should be able to directly attach the JS debugger to the mshta process. From there you could use the variable watch inspector to dump out a dom element node, which would include live style objects.

ymmv: How to debug IE9 HTA?

Community
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Marcus Pope
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You could use something like Appcelerator Titanium for Desktop which embeds a Webkit view and Webkit Inspector. It would also allow more HTML5 features to be used.

Nathan Moos
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