Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader ChocoDeveloper really wants to know what the deal is with Firefox and the “chrome://” schema:
It is a rather curious designation, no? It’s almost like finding out that the secret configuration menu on your new Ford truck has the password “Honda”. What’s the story?
When I want to configure an addon, for example Ghostery, the tab shows a URL like this one:
chrome://ghostery/content/options.html
What does it mean? Does it have something to do with the Chrome browser?
The Answer
SuperUser contributor Mark Henderson clears things right up:
Another contributor, Konrad Rudolph offers further insight into the naming of Chrome:
See here for more details – but no; nothing to do with Google Chrome.
So Chrome is both the term for the adornments and GUI surrounding the browsing pane as well as the name of a browser that eschews all of it for a cleaner browsing experience.
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
