Updated November 30, 2020 with new information about DoH in Edge, ECH, and HTTPSSVC records, and January 25, 2021 with a few remarks about Edge’s implementation. Type https://example.com in your web browser’s address bar and hit enter. What happens? Before connecting to the example.com server, your browser must convert “example.com” to the network address atContinue reading “Thoughts on DNS-over-HTTPS”
Tag Archives: Protocol
bye: FTP Support Is Going Away
Support for the venerable FTP protocol is being removed from Chromium. Standardized in 1971, FTP is not a safe protocol for the modern internet. Its primary defect is lack of support for encryption (FTPS isn’t supported by any popular browsers), although poor support for authentication and other important features (download resumption, proxying) also have hamperedContinue reading “bye: FTP Support Is Going Away”
Restrictions on File Urls
Last Update: October 1, 2025 For security reasons, Microsoft Edge 76+ and Chrome impose a number of restrictions on file:// URLs, including forbidding navigation to file:// URLs from non-file:// URLs. If a browser user clicks on a file:// link on an https-delivered webpage or PDF, nothing visibly happens. If you open the Developer Tools console on the webpage,Continue reading “Restrictions on File Urls”
Web-to-App Communication: App Protocols
Note: This post is part of a series about Web-to-App Communication techniques.Last updated: June 4, 2025 Just over eight years ago, I wrote my last blog post about App Protocols, a class of URI schemes that typically1 open another program on your computer instead of returning data to the web browser. A valid scheme name isContinue reading “Web-to-App Communication: App Protocols”
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