4 ms·
Ugh. This whole blog post is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Replacing all static accesses with dynamic ones, and with endless function calls everywhere has to de
by OskarS 7y ago
Ugh. This whole blog post is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Replacing all static accesses with dynamic ones, and with endless function calls everywhere has to destroy performance. You're intentionally making it hard for the JIT compiler to do its work.
And for what? Obfuscating your code so that people don't steal it or whatever? This kind of obfuscation can be easily and programmatically reversed engineered if someone really wants to, so... why do it? Just to screw with people trying to look at the source code of a web page?
People complain about JavaScript minifiers and WebAssembly that they're making the web less open and hackable, but at least those things have a point to them. There's a performance upside! This is just "naah, lets make the web slower, more closed and less hackable, for... you know... reasons."
- bjackman 7y agoIt strikes me as bizarre dissonance to write a blog post sharing the work you have done to avoid sharing your work.
- cannedslime 7y agoThe title of his blog implies he is "working on browser fingerprinting" and is proud of his occupation. So obviously the work he does is for ad agencies that frankly never gave two fricks about performance. Unless you are making a browser game and want to make life sad for cheaters, I don't really see a need or reason for obfuscating, and even then its not even ideal and a biproduct of a lazy solution (ie. not running simulation on a server)
- lultimouomo 7y agoHe's a researcher, he might be working on browser fingerprinting so that browsers can avoid it. That's how I interpreted it, at least; the fact that he interned at Brave seems to confirm it.
- cannedslime 7y agoSeems like most of his work on fingerprinting is centered around bot and headless browser detection.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago> So obviously the work he does is for ad agencies that frankly never gave two fricks about performance. Yikes, super hostile about an assumption you pulled out of your bum. Let's not dismiss other people's work so flippantly.
- cannedslime 7y agoYou are right. In hindsight it wasn't a reasonable assumption.
- javajosh 7y agoI would guess he was or is looking to defeat obfuscation of some bots (see his previous post https://antoinevastel.com/javascript/2019/08/31/sneakers-supreme-bots.html https://antoinevastel.com/javascript/2019/08/31/sneakers-sup...) and then got distracted/fascinated by the techniques the obfuscators used. I'd be generous and read the post in the satirical style of "10 ways you can screw up the web". BTW I totally agree with the sentiment that obfuscation is bad - and I would include shipping bundles without sourcemaps. The web got popular because of transparency, and people learning from each other. (If you really have IP-expressed-in-code you want to protect, don't ship it to clients!)