{"id":7570,"date":"2015-07-08T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2015-07-08T07:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7570"},"modified":"2015-07-23T15:54:16","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T22:54:16","slug":"hacking-the-crome-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7570","title":{"rendered":"Hacking the Chrome Browser"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoy hacking, although I&#8217;ve not always referred to it as such. Back in the day, I called it snooping, and it helped out tremendously when writing some of my early books and magazine articles.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI did my best snooping by using a debugger. I would load a program&#8217;s code into the debugger, not to see how they wrote the code, but to look for secrets.<\/p>\n<p>For example, upon debugging the DOS command processor, I would discover hidden and secret switches for the various commands. They would be listed along with the documented options, only they weren&#8217;t documented. So I&#8217;d try them out and see what they did.<\/p>\n<p>This type of snooping was done well before the Internet. So I couldn&#8217;t just find an undocumented switch and look it up on the Internet. Occasionally, when I had contact with Microsoft, I was able to get an answer as to the reason why something was undocumented or what the switch really did. Honestly, I never found the &#8220;Go Faster&#8221; option on anything. Most of the secrets were simply options used by the programmers to debug or test.<\/p>\n<p>My snooping continued and I made some interesting discoveries. Call it hacking if you will, but such persistence does pay off. Recently, I applied these techniques to the Chrome web browser.<\/p>\n<p>Chrome doesn&#8217;t really use dialog boxes. Instead, its settings and options are displayed in a web browser window. You just need to type the &#8220;address&#8221; of the item you want and Chrome displays the information like a web page.<\/p>\n<p>For example, Chrome settings are made by typing the address <code>chrome:\/\/settings<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>Review your bookmarks by typing <code>chrome:\/\/bookmarks<\/code><\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s where my snooping gene activated. As you type <code>chrome:\/\/<\/code> and then another letter, the AutoComplete function offers suggestions. That&#8217;s how you can see the pantheon of Chrome options and settings, including some that may not be accessed in other ways or could even be undocumented.<\/p>\n<p>For example, type <code>chrome:\/\/b<\/code> and you see a list similar to Figure 1.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7571\" style=\"width: 421px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7571\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Chrome_hacking-fig1.png\" alt=\"Figure 1. Discover Chrome internals, thanks to AutoComplete.\" width=\"411\" height=\"184\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7571\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Chrome_hacking-fig1.png 411w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Chrome_hacking-fig1-300x134.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 411px) 100vw, 411px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7571\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. Discover Chrome internals, thanks to AutoComplete.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>What are <em>blob-internals<\/em>? Sounds medical. Anyway, choose that option and you see a confusing list of whatever, which could be interesting, useful, or trivial &mdash; take your pick.<\/p>\n<p>So I went on a hunt. I typed <code>chrome:\/\/a<\/code> through <code>chrome:\/\/z<\/code> to see what came up. And for many letters of the alphabet, AutoComplete supplied me with a list of Chrome options and settings. I tried a few of them, and honestly, the majority are truly trivial.<\/p>\n<p>Still, that&#8217;s the kind of snooping I do, or call it hacking if you will. It&#8217;s not illegal and I&#8217;m not spreading viruses or anything that Google doesn&#8217;t want you to know about. It&#8217;s just a fun way for me to pass the time and maybe discover an actual secret. That&#8217;s how it works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finding the secrets just takes a wee bit of insight and some persistence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7570"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7619,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7570\/revisions\/7619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}