
The short history of the “about:” URL (2013) - johnmw
http://www.montulli.org/lou/about_urls
======
johnmw
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](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

~~~
lytedev
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!

~~~
kiallmacinnes
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.

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

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

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

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

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jancsika
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. :)

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czr
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, " ")))

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parliament32
The complete list of to-date about:mozilla passages:
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/book/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/book/)

I've always loved this easter egg.

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tannhaeuser
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.

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bugmen0t
Firefox has a list of all "about:" pages at about:about

~~~
jwilk
The article mentions that.

