How to create your own web browser from scratch

Have you ever thought about creating your own Internet browser? With the amount of bad press that many of today’s most popular web browsers are earning, especially due to the lack of privacy , the idea may have crossed your mind at some point.

In today’s post we are going to see how to create a simple web browser from scratch with the help of Visual Studio. It is a development environment that will help us shape our “homemade application” without too many complications, and although you have to write some code, the truth is that we hardly need to know how to program. It is enough for us to follow in detail the steps that we will explain below. Don’t lose the thread!

How to create a simple web browser for PC with Visual Studio

To get started, the first thing we have to do is download the Visual Studio Community 2022 application . It is free and can be downloaded directly from the official Microsoft website (available for Windows and Mac).

1- Install Visual Studio on your computer

Once we have downloaded and started the installer, we will have to select the workloads we want to install. We mark the “ .NET Desktop Development ” and “ Windows Application Development ” tabs and click on “ Install ”.

This is a fairly heavy installation (about 17GB), so the process may take a few minutes.

2- Create a new project

Once installed, we open the Visual Studio application. If it is the first time we access it, it will ask us for a username and password, although we can skip this step by clicking on “Skip this for the moment.”

Once inside the Visual Studio home screen, we choose “ Create a project ”.

Here we will find several predefined project templates: we look for the “ Windows Forms Application (.NET Framework) ” option and click “Next”.

Next we will give a name to our web browser. In the case of this example, we will call our browser “Android Feliz Navigator”.

3- Insert a “WebBrowser” type navigation box

This will allow us to enter the editor’s development environment, where we will click on the “ Toolbox ” menu located on the left side of the interface. If you don’t see the toolbox, click “View” in the top bar of Visual Basic and click “Toolbox.” Note: You can also open the toolbox with the key combination CONTROL+ALT+X.

Once we have the box displayed, we go to “ Common Controls ”, select the “ WebBrowser ” option and drag it to the “Form1” form.

Automatically, we will see how a “Properties” window loads on the right side. From here we can adjust some browser values, such as the height and width of the window, the font, the color or if we want it to have a scroll bar, as well as other variables. Note: If you don’t see the properties box, right-click on the Form1 window and click “Properties.”

Now we will return to the form window and click on the small drop-down button that appears in the upper right part of the window. We select “ Undock to primary container.

Next we will readjust the margins of the browser to leave some space for the buttons that we are going to create at the top of the window in a few seconds.

4- Create 5 buttons to navigate and load web pages

Now that we have created the window where the pages that we load will be displayed, we will create 5 buttons to control the navigation. The buttons will perform the functions of going to the previous page, going to the next page, refreshing, loading a page and going to the home page. The basics for surfing the internet.

To do this, we will return to the toolbox menu and in “ Common Controls ” we will drag the “ Button ” component to the form. We will place it in a corner and from the “Properties” box we will change the name to “ Back ” (“text” field).

We will repeat this same process and also create the “ Forward ”, “ Home ”, “ Refresh ” and “ Load ” buttons .

After this, we will also create a new component from “ Common Controls -> Text Box ”. This will be the text box where we will enter the URLs.

5- Program the button functions

This is the most interesting part. What we have to do now is double click on the “ Back ” button so that we can assign a function to it. This will open a code window, placing the cursor on a blank line. Without moving the cursor from where it is, we will write the following:

webBrowser1.GoBack();

Next, we will return to the form and double-click on the “ Forward ” button, inserting the following line of code:

webBrowser1.GoForward();

We will assign the following function to the “ Home ” button :

webBrowser1.Navigate(“https://www.google.com”);

In this example we have put the Google URL, but of course you can replace it with your favorite home page.

Regarding the “ Update ” button, we will apply the following function:

webBrowser1.Refresh();

Finally, in the “ Load ” button we will insert this other code:

webBrowser1.Navigate(textBox1.Text)

6- Save, compile and run the application

Now that we have each piece in place, we just have to save our project, go to the “Compile” menu and click on the “ Generate (name of our application) ” button. We can also press the keyboard shortcut CONTROL+B to start the compilation.

To see how our homemade browser works, all we have to do is click on the green button that says “ Start ”.

As you can see, we have a very attractive browser. It is still quite rustic, but as an introduction to the world of Visual Studio it is a very simple and interesting start. We can certainly improve it by making more adjustments and debugging, although that depends on how far we want to go with the development of our application and the free time we want to dedicate to the project.