The short history of the “about:” URL (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The short history of the “about:” URL (2013)

montulli.org

143 pointsjohnmw21 comments

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Note this was written by Lou Montulli who also wrote the amusing post about "The Origins of the <Blink> Tag" [1]

[1] http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

I didn't know about the about:about url, and have since found a number of amusing and useful links, for example:

Chrome:

chrome://site-engagement/

chrome://net-internals/#dns

chrome://net-export/

chrome://indexeddb-internals/#

Firefox:

about:mozilla

about:memory

about:robots

about:robots doesn't work on Firefox on Android (does on desktop Linux though).

A useful list of all the "abouts" in Firefox is

    about:about

This mentioned both by the parent and in the post.

This is not mentioned by the parent.

Don’t forget chrome://extensions

And chrome://restart

chrome://chrome-urls lists all of them, for those who don't know (including myself until 5 minutes ago!) Including ones for forcibly crashing chrome! chrome://inducebrowsercrashforrealz/

Love finding little Easter eggs like these! Thanks!

I'm on my cell phone, so... I cant test this out! But, this link led me to chrome://java-crash.

Please tell me I can't put that in an iframe or something similar! Visiting it on my android phone crashes the chrome app.

No, you cannot embed chrome:// urls this way (unless you find a bug!)

It's a pity they've removed about:cache

https://superuser.com/questions/1316540/where-has-chrome-cac...

The site-engagement one is particularly interesting. I guess Chrome tracks explicitly how much you use various sites. Seems to explain it more here https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-en...

Getting rid of that damn blink tag was the first time I ever directly edited a binary. Such a minor annoyance seems quaint now with what the web has become.

don't forget chrome://dino for the 'no internet' dinosaur game! (press spacebar...)

I'm Lou and I'm the author of that article.

If you have any questions I'm happy to answer them.

No further questions, just thanks for the enjoyable stories :-)

Not everything works in about:blank.

For example, if you go into devTools and try to build an SVG programmatically (or simply inject some innerHTML), the funcURLs won't pick up the ids in the <defs> section for things like gradients/patterns/etc.

I can't remember which part of which spec conflicts with the other on this. I just remember mentioning it on the SVG list and the Mozilla bug list. (It actually works in Chrome, which a Mozilla dev told me is a bug in Chrome. :)

slightly ot, but, if anyone else was distracted by the use of 3-4 spaces between each sentence, this JS snippet will fix it:

    document.querySelectorAll("td>div").forEach(x=>(x.innerHTML = x.innerHTML.replace(/&nbsp;/g, " ")))

The complete list of to-date about:mozilla passages: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/book/

I've always loved this easter egg.

about:legacy-compat made its way into HTML5 as the system identifier/URL of a (fictive) external SGML declaration set to contain declarations for the elements and attributes of HTML. It's required to make an HTML5 document a valid SGML application; if it weren't there, the declaration set would be treated as containing no declarations at all, which doesn't work for eg. empty (HTML "void") elements such as img and br, and also for writing enumerated attributes in their short forms such as in <option selected> etc.

Firefox has a list of all "about:" pages at about:about

The article mentions that.

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