Hey! Put some (dis)respect on the man’s name! Brave is made by the (idiotic) guy that made the backbone of modern interactive web(JavaScript) , Brandon Eich! He was one of the founders of Mozilla!
I’m missing something here. What’s the big thing people in this thread are hinting at JavaScript being used for that’s so sinister? Is it just like, tracking and stuff?
Yeah there’s loads of funny little quirks to the language. I actually quite like that about it, I think it’s sort of endearing and human, even when I’m frustrated with it.
I don’t know if it’s slow necessarily, but I do know that a lot of things I build (I have to build things designed by other people, I’ve tried to push back but ultimately it’s my boss designing a lot of it) is overengineered and relies on frankly too many moving parts, which could contribute to annoying UX I guess but with all the caching we have in place I’m not sure it’s slow… I’m not a computer science guy though, I might be just too dumb to understand how slow it is
“Just tracking and stuff” is a ridiculous understatement. The web of today is primarily a surveillance tool used to cram advertisements down our throats at the cost of anything else. The big players have become so good at it that they can identify you uniquely even if you don’t use their service, because the data collected is sold everywhere else.
It has turned us all into products.
Some of us still remember the glory of the early 90’s internet. The tooling needed to surveil wasn’t there yet, and most content was about being creative, expressive, and fun. Corporations have robbed us of that and it feels like every fucking website now is just another tool to commodify you.
Hey man, I agree with everything you’re saying and I genuinely mourn the freedom of expression that the web has lost. I was using “just tracking and stuff” as a shorthand as part of a conversation, cos I was just asking specifically about what I was missing from what people were talking about.
Let’s stop calling it tracking. Tracking can be done server-side. What you are referring to is spying if we’re calling a spade a spade.
Many modern websites won’t work without JavaScript enabled. They purposefully design essential features of the site to fail without JavaScript, so that is must be enabled, so that spying can occur. This is also slow, and bloated.
Sorry, I work with a marketing department so it’s just normalised to me to call it tracking despite the fact that yes, I agree with you that it’s surveillance and targeted ads are gross. What distinction are you making between tracking server-side, and spying? For me, I guess I’m talking about things like Google analytics or Google ads or hotjar or MS Carity when I say “tracking” in this context (JavaScript).
Well, if you sent a request to a web server, it is obviously gong to know that you requested something from it- so in general it should be the expectation of a user that the server owner has a reliable way to track that activity.
Tracking pixels, cookies, etc that follow a user around the web and gather activity that someone did NOT send to a server and relay it back to said server is IMHO spying.
Just because it’s being served into the browser on each payload doesn’t mean it was requested or desired.
All those things you named are spyware, marketed under the guise of diagnostic reporting. And, to be fair, that most certainly are also used for diagnostic purposes. But that’s not how they make money.
I need a lenticular post.
Hey! Put some (dis)respect on the man’s name! Brave is made by the (idiotic) guy that made the backbone of modern interactive web(JavaScript) , Brandon Eich! He was one of the founders of Mozilla!
Imagine what could’ve been if JavaScript never existed. It might have even been good!
Even JS had a golden period where it was generally used to make the web a bit more fun.
Corporate greed really robbed us all of a lot.
I’m missing something here. What’s the big thing people in this thread are hinting at JavaScript being used for that’s so sinister? Is it just like, tracking and stuff?
A pretty list:
https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs?tab=readme-ov-file#-examples
Also, javascript is quite heavy, slow, and many other shits, but i can’t confirm them as i’m not a web programmer
Yeah there’s loads of funny little quirks to the language. I actually quite like that about it, I think it’s sort of endearing and human, even when I’m frustrated with it.
I don’t know if it’s slow necessarily, but I do know that a lot of things I build (I have to build things designed by other people, I’ve tried to push back but ultimately it’s my boss designing a lot of it) is overengineered and relies on frankly too many moving parts, which could contribute to annoying UX I guess but with all the caching we have in place I’m not sure it’s slow… I’m not a computer science guy though, I might be just too dumb to understand how slow it is
“Just tracking and stuff” is a ridiculous understatement. The web of today is primarily a surveillance tool used to cram advertisements down our throats at the cost of anything else. The big players have become so good at it that they can identify you uniquely even if you don’t use their service, because the data collected is sold everywhere else.
It has turned us all into products.
Some of us still remember the glory of the early 90’s internet. The tooling needed to surveil wasn’t there yet, and most content was about being creative, expressive, and fun. Corporations have robbed us of that and it feels like every fucking website now is just another tool to commodify you.
Hey man, I agree with everything you’re saying and I genuinely mourn the freedom of expression that the web has lost. I was using “just tracking and stuff” as a shorthand as part of a conversation, cos I was just asking specifically about what I was missing from what people were talking about.
Yeah I get it, not trying to attack you but rather help you understand that what I think you’re missing may just be the scale of the problem.
Let’s stop calling it tracking. Tracking can be done server-side. What you are referring to is spying if we’re calling a spade a spade.
Many modern websites won’t work without JavaScript enabled. They purposefully design essential features of the site to fail without JavaScript, so that is must be enabled, so that spying can occur. This is also slow, and bloated.
Yeah, it sucks.
Sorry, I work with a marketing department so it’s just normalised to me to call it tracking despite the fact that yes, I agree with you that it’s surveillance and targeted ads are gross. What distinction are you making between tracking server-side, and spying? For me, I guess I’m talking about things like Google analytics or Google ads or hotjar or MS Carity when I say “tracking” in this context (JavaScript).
Well, if you sent a request to a web server, it is obviously gong to know that you requested something from it- so in general it should be the expectation of a user that the server owner has a reliable way to track that activity.
Tracking pixels, cookies, etc that follow a user around the web and gather activity that someone did NOT send to a server and relay it back to said server is IMHO spying.
Just because it’s being served into the browser on each payload doesn’t mean it was requested or desired.
All those things you named are spyware, marketed under the guise of diagnostic reporting. And, to be fair, that most certainly are also used for diagnostic purposes. But that’s not how they make money.
JavaScript is actually a beautiful language. It’s what people have done with and to it that’s the problem.
I program on JavaScript. It is not elegant, it is a permissive mess.
More, what people use it for.