[andywood]

Here's a late version of Encarta.

https://goo.gl/6uX4Qu

Do you see that plain-looking dropdown menu with the rounded orange highlights? That is Internet Explorer. Just this one menu. It's an in-process instance of Trident, IEs old HTML rendering engine. So that little window is the equivalent of somthing like chromium embedded. I don't know why that menu is an instance of IE's HTML renderer. Someone wanted to style it with CSS, I think. So they embedded IE. That flyout to the right is probably another Trident window. In order to meet accessibility requirements, I had to grab the running instance of the root IE COM interface, and route keyboard events into it. With raw C++ COM. There were other hooks going in the opposite direction so the menu / browser window could tell the app about clicks.

[birdiesanders]

That is just insane. Separate rendering engines for each tab?

[andywood]

I can't remember how the flyouts worked. They might have shared a window, or they might not have been HTML windows (but I think they were). What I know for sure is that the one main dropdown was IE.

[ashleyn]

Glass/gradients was a baaaad trend in visual styles. Very plastic, cheap looking.