ericlaw

Improving Privacy by Limiting Referrers

Updated July 31, 2020 to reflect changes planned to ship in Chrome 85 and Edge 86. As your browser navigates from page to page, servers are informed of the URL from where you’ve come from using the Referer HTTP header1; the document.referrer DOM property reveals the same information to JavaScript. Similarly, as the browser downloads theContinue reading “Improving Privacy by Limiting Referrers”

Restrictions on File Urls

Last Update: October 1, 2025 For security reasons, Microsoft Edge 76+ and Chrome impose a number of restrictions on file:// URLs, including forbidding navigation to file:// URLs from non-file:// URLs. If a browser user clicks on a file:// link on an https-delivered webpage or PDF, nothing visibly happens. If you open the Developer Tools console on the webpage,Continue reading “Restrictions on File Urls”

Same-Site Cookies By Default

The Chrome team is embarking on a clever and bold plan to change the recipe for cookies. It’s one of the most consequential changes to the web platform in almost a decade, but with any luck, users won’t notice anything has changed. But if you’re a web developer, you should start testing your sites andContinue reading “Same-Site Cookies By Default”

Aw, snap! What if Every Tab Crashes?

Update: I wrote a more comprehensive post about troubleshooting browser crashes. For a small number of users of Chromium-based browsers (including Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge) on Windows 10, after updating to 78.0.3875.0, every new tab crashes immediately when the browser starts. Impacted users can open as many new tabs as they like, butContinue reading “Aw, snap! What if Every Tab Crashes?”

Web-to-App Communication: DirectInvoke

Note: This post is part of a series about Web-to-App Communication techniques. Background Typically, if you want your website to send a document to a client application, you simply send the file as a download. Your server indicates that a file should be treated as a download in one of a few simple ways: Specifying aContinue reading “Web-to-App Communication: DirectInvoke”