Internet Explorer basic authentication automation

At work I tried setting a custom header (for example for basic authentication) when navigating the internet explorer activex component using OLE automation. I didn’t find much info on the web, so I post it here as a reminder.

Setting custom headers is in fact supported by the navigate method on the IWebBrowser2 interface as stated in the msdn: simply supply a 5th element. For example, in java it looks something like this:
invoke("Navigate", new Variant[]{
new Variant(url),
new Variant(),
new Variant(),
new Variant(),
new Variant("Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==")
});