Published at
Updated at
Reading time
2min
This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.

I just read the article "URLs: It's complicated..." and learned a few nifty tricks about internal pages in Chromies (Edge, Chrome, etc.) and Firefox.

You might know about the hidden browser games in Chrome (chrome://dino/) and Edge (edge://surf/), or the commonly used browser flags pages (chrome://flags, edge://flags and so on).

edge:surf and chrome:dino screenshots

Let's have a look at three things that make internal page handling easier!

Use about instead of your specific browser scheme

As described on web.dev, Chromium browsers rewrite not-matching browser schemes, if you enter an incorrect one. You can access chrome://flags in Edge and it'll be rewritten to edge://flags. That's already pretty handy, but there's more!

You can also use the about scheme to "resolve" to the correct browser scheme. about://flags becomes chrome://flags, brave://flags, or edge://flags depending on your browser. This rewrite is a great addition and I made it a habit to use about for all internal pages already!

You can leave out the //

While playing around with the about pages, I noticed that you can make the URL even shorter. Enter about:flags and it's correctly resolved to chrome://flags. That's pretty nice, too!

about:about โ€“ a list of all internal pages

And here's the kicker, if you wonder what internal pages your Chromium browser or Firefox provides, you can enter about:about...

Lists of internal pages shown under about:about in Chrome, Firefox and Edge

And there you have it, about:about lists all internal pages! I'll continue poking around all these pages now. ๐Ÿ‘‹

Pssst... If you like these short learnings, I send out a weekly newsletter.

Was this TIL post helpful?
Yes? Cool! You might want to check out Web Weekly for more quick learnings. The last edition went out 12 days ago.
Stefan standing in the park in front of a green background

About Stefan Judis

Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.

Related Topics

Related Articles