Edit Controls (Win32 API)

> The window (hWnd) that is active is actually an edit control

While this is the case when you enter the URL into say, the "Run Command" (WIN+R hotkey) dialog, most browsers implement their own GUI toolkit. To Windows (the OS) such a browser with all the widgets in its window just looks like one large top level window with no actual child windows. Hence the message gets dispatched to the browser toplevel window and the browsers toolkit then has to go through the whole paces of determining which control has the focus and dispatch the contents of the WM_CHAR messages.