Tag Archives: troubleshooting

Losing your cookies

“My browser lost its cookies” has long been one of the most longstanding Support complaints in the history of browsers. Unfortunately, the reason that it has been such a longstanding issue is that it’s not the result of a single problem, and if the problem is intermittent (as it often is), troubleshooting the root causeContinue reading “Losing your cookies”

Accessibility (UIA) Troubleshooting

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 some cases, you may be surprisedContinue reading “Accessibility (UIA) Troubleshooting”

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)”

Celebrating Fifteen Years

While lately I’ve been endlessly streaming the latest news with horrified fascination, this morning my calendar unexpectedly popped up a reminder set over a year ago… Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my big-league blogging debut on the Internet Explorer Team’s blog. My first post there, “A HTTP Detective Story” remains one of my favorites.Continue reading “Celebrating Fifteen Years”

Aw, snap! What if Every Tab Crashes?

For a small number of users of Chromium-based browsers (including Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge) on Windows 10, after updating to 78.0.3875.0, every new tab crashes immediately when the browser starts. Impacted users can open as many new tabs as they like, but each will instantly crash: As of Chrome 81.0.3992, the page will showContinue reading “Aw, snap! What if Every Tab Crashes?”

Get Help with HTTPS problems

Sometimes, when you try to load a HTTPS address in Chrome, instead of the expected page, you get a scary warning, like this one: Chrome has found a problem with the security of the connection and has blocked loading the page to protect your information. In a lot of cases, if you’re just surfing around,Continue reading “Get Help with HTTPS problems”

Reset Fiddler’s HTTPS certificates

I’ve made changes to the latest versions of Fiddler to improve the performance of certificate creation, and to avoid problems with new certificate validation logic coming to Chrome and Firefox. The biggest of the Fiddler changes is that CertEnroll is now the default certificate generator on Windows 7 and later. Unfortunately, this change can causeContinue reading “Reset Fiddler’s HTTPS certificates”