Internet Explorer-Based Publication

This means that websites that are compatible with Internet Explorer can be turned into compiled self-running websites (.exe files) thanks to HTML Executable, and keep their functionality.

IE browser publications act like Internet Explorer, displaying a main window where end users can navigate through your website and read the different HTML pages. The main difference with Internet Explorer is that the source HTML files of your website are not unpacked to the user's hard disk; moreover you can also configure several options to protect your HTML source code (do you remember the context menu command "Show the source code"? In an IE browser publication, you can disable it without any JavaScript trick).

How does it work?

HTML Executable creates a single executable file: end users just need to run it to open the browser's main window. As explained above, this window is designed to behave like Internet Explorer and any standard web browser, because many users are familiar with that interface style: they can find some useful additional navigation features (search, print preview, copy, favorites) in addition to the traditional navigation buttons (back, forward, home, refresh, print...).

Moreover IE browser publications do not require any file to be first locally extracted (except some file types like Flash movies, PDF, FLV files or for any ActiveX plug-ins). They read the necessary data directly and silently from the program's memory: consequently end users cannot access to the source of your HTML data and files. Your HTML documents are safe and cannot be copied without your authorization (HTML Executable provides you also with several ways to protect your HTML documents).

All interesting features of Internet Explorer are also available in IE browser publications built with HTML Executable: in addition to the latest HTML features, you have support for DHTML, JavaScript, ActiveX controls...

About the IE browser engine

IE browser publications are based on the Microsoft WebBrowser control.

Note that you do not need any knowledge about the WebBrowser control in order to use HTML Executable!

This ActiveX control which is available as a standard component of Windows 98 and higher (users of Windows 95 must have first installed Internet Explorer 4.0+) is provided by Microsoft to developers who want to add browser functionality to their applications. It uses the same code as Internet Explorer, that's why they support the same features. For further information about the WebBrowser control, see this page Reusing the WebBrowser Control (Internet Explorer - WebBrowser).

When an IE browser publication is run, it creates its own custom protocol (similar to HTTP, FTP, etc...) in order to communicate with the WebBrowser control. In other words, an IE browser publication works like a small server combined with a client (the main window allowing users to navigate through the HTML pages).
Your website is then available as if it was on a server, except that no Internet connection is necessary!

Finally please remember that IE browser publications require Internet Explorer 4.0+ (or higher) or Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003 Server, Vista (or higher). They are not really stand-alone although you could consider that nowadays almost all computers running Windows has the WebBrowser component (so end users will always be able to read your publication).

Compiled publications currently work with Internet Explorer versions 4.0+ to 7.0.

If you want to create a real stand-alone publication (that does not require any third-party component), then you should consider creating a HTML Viewer publication.

About the IE Runtime Module

Even if IE browser publications use the WebBrowser control, the code necessary to run them takes about 1 Mb uncompressed (without compressed files). This is relatively small compared to the sizes of the other web browsers' distributions. Anyway this is still large for small websites.

This is the main reason why the code necessary to run IE browser publications was put in a single external program file called the IE Runtime Module (or IERuntime or IEViewer Runtime). This module is a program that allows IE publications to be run: it works like Visual Basic DLL runtimes, the Macromedia Flash player, Windows Installer runtime, etc...

When you run a publication, the latter will simply launch the IE Runtime module which will open the publication and display it.

Now you have several possibilities for different scenarios:

• The IE Runtime module can be merged with the publication .exe file. In other words, you do not need to distribute it separately: if the publication does not find it on the user's computer, it will use the viewer merged within its data to run. So this is exactly like if there was no runtime module at all.
   
• Merging the runtime module makes your publications larger (it adds about 0,8 Mb to the .exe final size). If your website is large, then the size of the runtime module may be negligible compared to the size of the compressed website files. However there are two additional cases:
  • if your website is small, the publication will be larger due to the size of the runtime module.
  • if you plan to distribute several publication files, then it is probably not necessary that the runtime module is merged with each publication file.
     
• Not merging the runtime module results into smaller publications (in this case the code added to the .exe file takes only about 70kb!).
  You can then distribute the runtime module along with your publication files (HTML Executable has ready-to-use Setup programs to install runtime modules), put it on your website for download, or even put a link to the HTML Executable homepage where the latest versions of our runtime modules are always freely available for download.
  If the runtime module is not merged, and it is not available on the user computer, the publication will display a message (that you can modify of course) with instructions about how to get and install the runtime module.

In any case, you can decide which solution is the best for you. If the size does not matter, then it is better that you merge the runtime module.

Types of publications