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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‘‹

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About Stefan Judis

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

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