So far, the responses from beta testers has been very good. But, it is obvious what features I will be working on for the next version. The loudest requests so far have been for keyboard/mouse support. Unfortunately, this feature has proved to be nearly impossible up to this point in time. I have burned at least 60 hours of research/debugging/coding trying to get that SINGLE feature to work correctly.

MCEBrowser uses an Internet Explorer ActiveX control to display the web pages. Have you ever been typing in the IE address bar, and have the focus taken away by a web page that just finished loading? That’s the problem I am trying to overcome in MCEBrowser. When the web page steals focus, Media Center thinks that another application has gained focus. This causes Media Center to shrink and display the task bar at the bottom of the screen. When you use the remote again, Media Center regains focus, and the result is this weird twitching behavior.

I even spent about 3 hours integrating the Mozilla ActiveX Control into MCEBrowser, only to find out that the Mozilla control currently has very limited DOM support, which prevents me from implementing the link navigation.

I haven’t given up hope yet… But, I can’t support mouse or keyboard input until this issue is resolved.