ericlaw

Out-of-Memory is (Usually) a Lie

The most common exception logged by Fiddler telemetry is OutOfMemoryException. Yesterday, a Facebook friend lamented: “How does firefox have out of memory errors so often while only taking up 1.2 of my 8 gigs of ram?” This morning, a Python script running on my machine as a part of the Chromium build process failed with aContinue reading “Out-of-Memory is (Usually) a Lie”

Things I’ve Learned in my first weeks on Chrome

This is a stub post which will be updated periodically. It would be impossible to summarize how much I’ve learned in the last six weeks working at Google, but it’s easy to throw together some references to the most interesting and accessible things I’ve learned. So that’s this post. Developing Chrome Searching the code isContinue reading “Things I’ve Learned in my first weeks on Chrome”

Web Developers and Footguns

If you offer web developers footguns, you’d better staff up your local trauma department. In a prior life, I wrote a lot about Same-Origin-Policy, including the basic DENY-READ principle that means that script running in the context of origin A.com cannot read content from B.com. When we built the (ill-fated) XDomainRequest object in IE8, weContinue reading “Web Developers and Footguns”

Leaking Keystrokes

Windows 10’s IE11 continues to send your keystrokes over the internet in plaintext as you type in the address bar, a part of the “Search Suggestions” feature: “But I don’t search from the address bar,” you might say. That may be, but if you fail to type or paste a URL (sans protocol) into theContinue reading “Leaking Keystrokes”

Extended Validation Certificates – The Introduction

In 2005, one of my first projects on the Internet Explorer team was improving the user-experience for HTTPS sites (“SSLUX”). Our first task was to change the certificate error experience from the confusing and misleading modal dialog box: … to something that more clearly conveyed the risk and which more clearly discouraged users from acceptingContinue reading “Extended Validation Certificates – The Introduction”