browsers – Page 17

Web Proxy Auto Discovery (WPAD)

Back in the mid-aughts, Adam G., a colleague on the IE team, used the email signature “IE Networking Team – Without us, you’d be browsing your hard drive.” And while I’m sure it was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s really true– without a working network stack, web browsers aren’t nearly as useful. BackgroundContinue reading “Web Proxy Auto Discovery (WPAD)”

Avoiding Unexpected Navigation

For over twenty years, browsers broadly supported two features that were often convenient but sometimes accidentally invoked, leading to data loss. The first feature was that hitting backspace would send the user back one page in their navigation history. (Dec 2022 Update: I’ve been using this feature for 25 years or so now and onlyContinue reading “Avoiding Unexpected Navigation”

Browser Basics: User Gestures

The Web Platform offers a great deal of power, and unfortunately evil websites go to great lengths to abuse it. One of the weakest (but simplest to implement) protections against such abuse is to block actions that were not preceded by a “User Gesture.” Such gestures (sometimes more precisely called User Activations) include a varietyContinue reading “Browser Basics: User Gestures”

A bit of GREASE keeps the web moving

For the first few years of the web, developers pretty much coded whatever they thought was cool and shipped it. Specifications, if written at all, were an afterthought. Then, for the next two decades, spec authors drafted increasingly elaborate specifications with optional features and extensibility points meant to be used to enable future work. Unfortunately,Continue reading “A bit of GREASE keeps the web moving”

META CHARSET

Someone complained that a Japanese page is garbled in Edge/Chrome, but renders with the correct characters in Firefox and IE: The problem is that Chromium is using an unexpected character set to interpret the response in the HTML Parser. That happens because the server doesn’t send a proper character set directive. To avoid problems likeContinue reading “META CHARSET”