Back in 2019, I explained how browsers’ cookie controls and privacy features present challenges for common longstanding patterns for authentication flows. Such flows often rely upon an Identity Provider (IdP) having access to its own cookies both on top-level pages served by the IdP and when the IdP receives a HTTP request from an XmlHttpRequest/fetchContinue reading “Auth Flows in a Partitioned World”
Tag Archives: interop
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)”
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”
Improving Privacy by Limiting Referrers
Updated July 31, 2020 to reflect changes planned to ship in Chrome 85 and Edge 86. As your browser navigates from page to page, servers are informed of the URL from where you’ve come from using the Referer HTTP header1; the document.referrer DOM property reveals the same information to JavaScript. Similarly, as the browser downloads theContinue reading “Improving Privacy by Limiting Referrers”
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