Using WebView2 in Windows PE?

[mtniehaus]

Windows PE (used to install Windows OSes) contains only the IE11 engine and MSHTA.EXE; we would like to use a "real" browser control and have been experimenting with WebView2 but not having much luck running it in Windows PE. When starting to load, we get a COMException:

Any idea what we're running into here? This is an x64 OS with no wow64 support (so no ability to run 32-bit code).

The same Windows PE OS can use CefSharp (.NET 8 + WPF) without any issues.

[victorhuangwq]

WebView2 on Windows PE is not currently officially supported. That being said, could @lflores-ms take a look if you have time?

[icnocop]

Any updates or workarounds? Thank you.

[icnocop]

Related: #4947 and #4951

[mtniehaus]

I would really like to get this to work, so let me throw in my progress:

• Windows PE runs as LocalSystem, which Edge does not like. Add "--allow-run-as-system" to get around that,
• Windows PE is missing Media Foundation files (mf.dll, mfplat.dll), copy those from a Windows install into X:\windows\system32.
• Windows PE doesn't have a user profile folder. Specify something like --user-data-dir="x:\temp" (needs to exist, create it first).

I've experimented with a variety of other options, but they all seem to fail. "--headless" gets it to run, but without a UI, so it seems very likely that this is GPU-related.

I've attached a log from my most recent attempt.

logfile.txt