As you say, the control should not follow a link; it should open a web browser with the link (i.e. just do a Process.Start on the url). As I've always undertand it, AllowNavigation=false is what you want in that scenario. The .net browser control docs say: "Gets or sets a value indicating whether the control can navigate to another page after its initial page has been loaded.". So if on Linux with ff29 having it = false keeps even the initial page from loading, then we should fix that instead.