Something's Missing from the WebBrowser Control

Sometimes seemingly simple things are the most expensive to achieve. One such thing involves the Windows Phone WebBrowser control that allows you to show arbitrary web content embedded in your application.

The problem I ran into is that the control does not show any scrollbars when the content is larger than the visible area. This is a bit of a surprise, because the built-in browser of the phone does this nicely:

This means that your user has no indication of the total content length or the current scroll position when you show HTML content in your application, which is a bit unfortunate. In the following I talk about the various attempts and ideas I tried to fix this; if you're only interested in a possible work around, you can skip to the end of the post. More...