I am not really a fan of Dark Mode — I like my screens bright and shiny. But it’s October, and it’s sometimes fun to make things dark and spooky. Some users of my Show Browser Version extension wanted it to better support Dark Mode– the default text colors didn’t work well when the browserContinue reading “Spooky: Enhancing Dark Mode in Chromium”
Category Archives: dev
Accessibility (UIA) Troubleshooting
Last update: Sept 20, 2023 Chromium-based browsers offer a number of accessibility-related features. When you visit about:accessibility, you can see more about the state of these features (similarly, you can find the states in about:histograms/Accessibility.ModeFlag). You can enable features via the Accessibility page, or pass the command line argument –force-renderer-accessibility into the browser. In someContinue reading “Accessibility (UIA) Troubleshooting”
Practical Time Machines
Many “emergency” situations in our modern world would’ve been easy to fix had they been foreseen in advance. If only we’d known what was going to happen, the badness could’ve easily been prevented. Unfortunately, when problems are discovered only “as they happen” in production, everyone must race to minimize the damage and put out theContinue reading “Practical Time Machines”
Simply Making Simple Fixes Simple for Chromium
Google recently introduced a cool web-based editing tool for Chromium source code, a very stripped down version of the Willy Wonka tooling Googlers get to use for non-Chromium projects. I’ve used this tool to submit two trivial change lists (CLs, aka PRs) to Chromium, but I was curious about whether this new feature would workContinue reading “Simply Making Simple Fixes Simple for Chromium”
Debugging Browsers – Tools and Techniques
Last update: November 14, 2023 Earlier this year, I shared a post on how you can become an expert on web browsers from the comfort of your desk… or anywhere else you have an internet connection. In that post, I mostly covered how to search through the source, review issue reports, and find design documentation.Continue reading “Debugging Browsers – Tools and Techniques”
Web Debugging: Watching Element Changes
Recently, I was debugging a regression where I wanted to watch change’s in an element’s property at runtime. Specifically, I wanted to watch the URL change when I select different colors in Tesla’s customizer. By using the Inspect Element tool, I can find the relevant image in the tree, and then when I pick aContinue reading “Web Debugging: Watching Element Changes”
Browser Memory Limits
Last Update: November 29, 2023 Web browsers are notorious for being memory hogs, but this can be a bit misleading– in most cases, the memory used by the loaded pages accounts for the majority of memory consumption. Unfortunately, some pages are not very good stewards of the system’s memory. One particularly common problem is memoryContinue reading “Browser Memory Limits”
Web-to-App Communication: The Native Messaging API
Note: This post is part of a series about Web-to-App Communication techniques. One of the most powerful mechanisms for Web-to-App and App-To-Web communication is to use an extension that utilizes the NativeMessaging API. The NativeMessaging API allows an extension running inside the browser to exchange messages with a native-code “Host” executable running outside of the browserContinue reading “Web-to-App Communication: The Native Messaging API”
Seamless Single Sign-On
There are many different authentication primitives built into browsers. The most common include Web Forms authentication, HTTP authentication, client certificate authentication, and the new WebAuthN standard. Numerous different authentication frameworks build atop these, and many enterprise websites support more than one scheme. Each of the underlying authentication primitives has different characteristics: client certificate authentication isContinue reading “Seamless Single Sign-On”
Same Origin Policy & CORS
I wrote some foundational web platform explanation posts back in my IEBlog days and they keep getting lost. So I’m linking them here. Same Origin Policy, the security policy which determines whether one site may interact with content from another site, and what limits apply, is one such foundational concept that is core to understandingContinue reading “Same Origin Policy & CORS”
text/plain 