>>Dear All,
>>
>>Probably aiming at the impossible, but does anyone know how to open an URL in the default browser, through ShellExecute or other shell method, in a way that will launch the browser in a named window? That is, the functional equivalent of the target attribute of the HTML anchor element? It may be browser-specific (most probably, it has to be), but must be runnable from the command line.
>>
>>Thanks in advance (that will cover a no-can-do seal, also, of course!).
>
>I think that I understand now
why what I was looking for is not only impossible, but also undesirable.
>
>A named window is not shared between different unrelated pages. If a page could access the name of windows that a browser is holding for its different script environments, or the windows, themselves, then they could be referenced or even hijacked by a malicious script.
>
>While trying to put this together, I wrote a small proxy program to load a page in a specific named window. It goes like this (it's not my first version, that was more obvious, but it's functionally equivalent):
>
>
><html>
><head/>
><body>
><script type="text/javascript">
>var target = window.open("", "targetWindow");
>
>if (target){
>
> target.location.href = window.location.search.substr(1);
> window.close();
>
>} else alert("Could not retrieve the targeted URL");
>
></script>
></body>
></html>
>>
>It can be ran from
http://www.aftlopes.com/proxy.html, by giving an URL as its query string.
>
>Now, if you run the proxy in a browser, for instance,
http://www.aftlopes.com/proxy.html?http://vfpx.codeplex.com, it will open the target URL (provided you gave it the permission to open windows) in a new window/tab named targetWindow. If you refresh the proxy, the target URL is reloaded as well, in the same window that was used in the first run.
>
>But, if you open a new tab and launch the proxy again, the same
http://www.aftlopes.com/proxy.html?http://vfpx.codeplex.com, it will run in a new script environment, with a new and different "targetWindow" of its own.
>
>And that what's happens with ShellExecute: the browser is launched and instantiates a new script environment, that can not reference the objects of other running environments.
>
>I wish I could be wrong about all this, of course, and would look forward to be corrected...
But what if you didn't launch the browser via shellexecute but had an object reference to it, then it wouldn't be new environment every time, eh?
