How chrome URLS work?

Question

When I say,

chrome://downloads

here my understanding is, chrome is a protocol talking to chrome engine and downloads is like a tag name for specific request to chrome engine.

Is that correct? How does it work(under the hood)?

Answer 1

It's just an internal protocol handler. Browser itself registers a handler to handle URLs that use that protocol. Browsers even let you register your own protocol handlers nowadays.

For more info see:

• https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/webappapis.html#dom-navigator-registerprotocolhandler

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler

• https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2011/06/Registering-a-custom-protocol-handler