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Did something break in Chrome/Mac?
Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 9:45 AM by Dave Winer.
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  • Update: Thanks to elasticthreads, in a comment thread belog, for helping with a few workarounds, and the first one I tried worked. I have a fix I can release if other Frontier/OPML Editor users are seeing the same problem. Right now since I've not heard from anyone, I'm not going to do a release.
  • I have a question to ask other people who do web development on a Mac using Chrome. I'm not trying to make news, this is just a question. I'm using my blog to ask it.
  • 1. Back in Netscape days the browser supported a set of interapplication messages called "Apple Events" that allowed other apps to make calls to the browser to get it to do things.
  • 2. The most useful one, imho, was the GURL message, which said "Here's a URL, please open it in the browser."
  • 3. This feature is deeply integrated in my CMS. I put my cursor on something, right-click and choose View in Browser. It figures out what its URL is and shoots a GURL message over to the browser, and within a second I'm viewing the page.
  • 4. This feature was copied by every browser from then on. You could shoot a GURL over to any of them and they'd open the page. This included Chrome. Until sometime in the last few days. Then it stopped working.
  • 5. I rebooted the system, relaunched the browser and my CMS, it still doesn't work.
  • So my question is this -- if you do web development on Mac with Chrome, did this stop working for you too?
  • PS: I started a Hacker News thread for this, in case you prefer to comment there.
  • PPS: Losing this feels like losing the right rear-view-mirror on a car. Very jarring.
  • PPPS: Gradually our development environment is being whittled away by Google and Apple. If I were paranoid I'd think they want to slow us all down, for some reason. That's the net effect.