Author Archives: ericlaw

Trim Your Whitespace

Leading and trailing whitespace are generally invisible. Humans are bad at dealing with things they can’t see. If your system accepts textual codes, or any other human-generated or human-mediated input, you should trim whitespace, whether it’s leading, trailing, or inline (if not meaningful). // Trim leading and trailing whitespace $(‘inputCode’).value = $(‘inputCode’).value.trim(); It’s downright sillyContinue reading “Trim Your Whitespace”

Debug Native Messaging

Prelude Last month, an Enterprise customer reached out to report that a 3rd-party browser extension they use wasn’t working properly. Investigation of the extension revealed that the browser extension relied upon a NativeMessaging Host (NMH) companion that runs outside of the browser’s sandbox. In reviewing a Process Monitor log provided by the customer, the SupportContinue reading “Debug Native Messaging”

Lock down web browsing using Kiosk Mode

Browsers get used in many different environments. Today, I take a look at scenarios where there’s either no interactive user (digital signage) or a potentially malicious user (internet kiosks). Digital Signage (fullscreen) Requirements In the Digital Signage scenario, there’s a full-screen webpage rendering and there are no user-accessible input devices– the canonical example here wouldContinue reading “Lock down web browsing using Kiosk Mode”

Edge Command Line Arguments

Microsoft Edge offers broad variety of configuration options via Group Policy (for Enterprises), the edge://settings page, the edge://flags page (mostly experimental options), and finally via command-line arguments that are passed to the msedge.exe executable. This list of sources is roughly in order of stability and supportability– earlier choices change less often (and with more notice)Continue reading “Edge Command Line Arguments”

Microsoft Edge’s Many Processes

Chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge use a multi-process architecture for reliability and security reasons. tl;dr For reliability, Process isolation means that if one process crashes, the entire browser need not go down. For example, if a page on leaky.com has a memory leak that’s so bad that its tab crashes with an out-of-memory error, yourContinue reading “Microsoft Edge’s Many Processes”

Great Bug Reports via “Recreate My Problem” in Microsoft Edge

When you encounter a problem in Microsoft Edge, you can let the team know about it using the … Menu > Help and Feedback > Send Feedback command. Clicking this menu item will open Edge’s feedback wizard, which provides tons of options about what information will be submitted along with your bug report. Generally speaking,Continue reading “Great Bug Reports via “Recreate My Problem” in Microsoft Edge”

Spooky: Enhancing Dark Mode in Chromium

I am not really a fan of Dark Mode — I like my screens bright and shiny. But it’s October, and it’s sometimes fun to make things dark and spooky. Some users of my Show Browser Version extension wanted it to better support Dark Mode– the default text colors didn’t work well when the browserContinue reading “Spooky: Enhancing Dark Mode in Chromium”