The Family Historian Web Search window requires a web browsing component provided by Microsoft, called WebView2 (or sometimes “Microsoft Edge WebView2”). If you have Windows 10, the likelihood is that this component will be pre-installed on your computer. Even if you have Windows 7 or 8, it may already be installed. If it is not installed, Family Historian will attempt to download and install it from the Internet, when you install Family Historian, or apply an upgrade, from version 7.0.6 onwards. Sometimes this may fail – if, for example, your Internet connection is down when you run the installation program. In that case, when you open the Web Search Window, within Family Historian, you will see a message saying that a required component is missing. The message is a link. Clicking on it brings you to this page.
To install WebView2 and get the Web Search Window working, there is no need to reinstall Family Historian. Instead, you can download an installation program for WebView2 from this Microsoft web page: WebView2 Runtime. You will need to scroll down to a section on that page labelled “Download the WebView2 Runtime”. The installer you want is called Evergreen Standalone Installer. If you have a 32-bit version of Windows (rare), you should click on the blue “x86” button. If you have a 64-bit version of Windows (much more common), you should click on the blue “x64” button. In either case, when you press the button, you will be prompted to accept a licence agreement, after which an installation program will be downloaded to your computer. When the installation program has been successfully downloaded, close any open applications and then run the program to install WebView2. When the install has completed, start Family Historian. You should find that the Web Search window is now working and can now display web pages.