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”
Category Archives: browsers
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”
Automatically Evaluating Compressibility
Fiddler’s Transformer tab has long been a simple way to examine the use of HTTP compression of web assets, especially as new compression engines (like Zopfli) and compression formats (like Brotli) arose. However, the one-Session-at-a-time design of the Transformer tab means it is cumbersome to use to evaluate the compressibility of an entire page orContinue reading “Automatically Evaluating Compressibility”
Putting Users First
When I worked on Internet Explorer, the team was proud of the fact that we could claim to be more aligned with our users’ goals than either of our major competitors (both of whom were funded almost entirely by advertising). IE, the story went, was paid for by users who purchased Windows, and thus ourContinue reading “Putting Users First”