What protocols are supported by Google chrome browser?

Question

Is it that all protocols implemented on top of TCP/ UDP are supported by chrome? Does HTTP/ HTTPS implementation somehow hides functioning SMTP or FTP in the background ?

Do all browsers support ssh through them or is it a design thing?

Endospore

What are you asking? – Masoretic

Answer 1

In terms of what protocols you can use in the Chrome browser bar you can use: HTTP, HTTPS, FILE, and FTP. SSH is not implemented by Chrome, but rather it implements SSL. It also does not implement SMTP, but rather when you visit a website like Gmail or Yahoo mail, you are simply visiting a website (via HTTP or hopefully HTTPS). That website is not at all connecting to an SMTP server to display your emails, but is merely serving up web pages and connecting to API's to display/edit/compose your email (by then which the email client's backend is connected to their SMTP server).

Also chrome does implement FTP, like you can visit an IP address that has FTP enable such as : ftp://123.34.45.890 and you can use the directory listings as a webpage. An example of this would the CentOS mirrors here. On the right column they have FTP sites. You can access the FTP director via web browser that supports FTP or you can fire up a terminal and do ftp ftp://ftp.is.co.za/mirror/centos/.

Nari

What about other browsers, like Mozilla? Do all of them support only those 4 protocols (Http, Https, File, Ftp) or are there any variations? – Endospore

@Endospore As far as I know these are the only protocols that are implemented where one can interact with content, for example a file or webpage. However each browser implements their own set "protocols" for things like settings. For example in firefox you have the "about:" protocol. More here: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/The_about_protocol – Nari

I would also add WS and WSS protocols. – Duffy

The CentIOS mirrors page doesn't show any ftp links – Porcia

Note that as of M88, Chrome no longer supports FTP. For more info, see: developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-88-deps-rems/… – Flyte

Answer 2

For the ssh part,Google chrome supports SSL and not ssh. Though ssh can be done using extensions like secure-shell. These extensions combines the ssh command (see http://openssh.org/ for details) ported to NativeClient with the “hterm” terminal emulator to provide a secure shell client for the Chrome browser.

Though a key thing to be noted is that “HTML Terminal”, or hterm, is an xterm-compatible terminal emulator written entirely in JavaScript.

It is intended to be fast enough and correct enough to compete with native terminals such as xterm, gnome-terminal, konsole and Terminal.app.

hterm is only a terminal emulator. It does not provide SSH access (or any other text-based command) on its own.

Towering

Answer 3

See the Code Layout section of the Network Stack design document from chromium.org

As of now, the following protocols are supported:

• net/base - Grab bag of net utilities, such as host resolution, cookies, network change detection, SSL.

• net/disk_cache - Cache for web resources.

• net/ftp - FTP implementation. Code is primarily based on the old HTTP implementation.

• net/http - HTTP implementation.

• net/ocsp - OCSP implementation when not using the system libraries or if the system does not provide an OCSP implementation. Currently only contains an NSS based implementation.

• net/proxy - Proxy (SOCKS and HTTP) configuration, resolution, script fetching, etc.

• net/quic - QUIC implementation.

• net/socket - Cross-platform implementations of TCP sockets, "SSL sockets", and socket pools.

• net/socket_stream - socket streams for WebSockets.

• net/spdy - HTTP2 (and its predecessor) SPDY implementation.

• net/url_request - URLRequest, URLRequestContext, and URLRequestJob implementations.

• net/websockets - WebSockets implementation

.

Sibylsibylla

Answer 4

The 4 main protocols are HTTP, HTTPS, FILE, FTP. All other protocols are designed to work on top of them.

For the second part, all browsers can be made to support ssh through them.

Soiree

Not entirely sure you know what "protocol" means. – Hobgoblin