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”
Category Archives: dev
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”
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”