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”
Category Archives: dev
Analyzing Network Traffic Logs (NetLog json)
Previously, I’ve described how to capture a network traffic log from Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and applications based on Chromium or Electron. In this post, I aim to catalog some guidance for looking at these logs to help find the root cause of captured problems and otherwise make sense of the data collected. Last Update:Continue reading “Analyzing Network Traffic Logs (NetLog json)”
Demystifying Browsers
Last update: October 29, 2024 Web browsers are conceptually pretty simple, but their code and the ecosystems that arise around the platforms they expose are immensely complicated. I started building browser extensions more than 22 years ago, and I started building browsers directly just over 16 years ago. At this point, I think it’s fairContinue reading “Demystifying Browsers”
App-to-Web Communication: Launching Web Apps
In recent posts, I’ve explored mechanisms to communicate from web content to local (native) apps, and I explained how web apps can use the HTML5 registerProtocolHandler API to allow launching them from either local apps or other websites. In today’s post, we’ll explore how local apps can launch web apps in the browser. It’s Simple…Continue reading “App-to-Web Communication: Launching Web Apps”
My New Chromium Build PC
While I do most of my work in an office, from time to time I work on code changes to Chromium at home. With the recent deprecation of Jumbo Builds, building the browser on my cheap 2016-era Dell XPS 8900 (i7-6700K) went from unpleasant to impractical. While I pondered buying a high-end Threadripper, I couldn’tContinue reading “My New Chromium Build PC”