Down the (fire)foxhole

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:16:45 +1300

This weekend I decided to add Mozilla Firefox support for my IPONZ Linker Chrome extension, mainly because Firefox supports extensions on mobile.

Since I use Chrome APIs like chrome.storage, I was checking whether I needed to swap when I came across a comment that mentioned “chrome” is UI jargon that might have been originally coined by Mozilla.

Curiosity led me down a rabbit hole of deep browser lore.

In 1997 while working at Netscape, engineer Dave Hyatt wrote the first specification of XUL (pronounced /zool/ as a Ghostbusters reference), standing for XML-based User Interface Language. In the context of XUL, “chrome” referred to the top level window containing groups of UI elements, so anything making up the UI of the application (as opposed to content) was considered “chrome”. XUL was used to help rewrite the UI of the Netscape browser, which was open-sourced in 1998 and became the Mozilla project. A search for “chrome” in an archive of the 1998 codebase shows many instances throughout.

IPONZ Linker

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 14:54:19 +1300

Have you ever wanted to share a link to your favourite NZ Intellectual Property right? Probably not, but if you’re in the IP profession you may have realised that this was not possible at all 😢

The URL when viewing a record on an IPONZ register looks something like this: https://app.iponz.govt.nz/app/Extra/IP/Mutual/Browse.aspx?sid=638957163299224953

Notice that there is no case number to be seen. When you look up a record, that action is stored on the server as session state, and you’re redirected away from the search page. Then you’re connected back to your session via a session ID to view the record. This means the URL is totally useless as a permanent link, which seems suboptimal for a public register.

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Down the (fire)foxhole

IPONZ Linker