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Does Google execute JavaScript?

stephanboyer.com

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Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#101

Post by ams6110 »

matt4077 wrote: post #49
camus2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe killed Flash itself, not Apple, not Chrome,not anti-flash troll X or Z on the internet.

You're arguing from a different definition under which nobody but Adobe ever had the possibility to "kill" flash. I doubt there's much disagreement that Apple's refusal of flash on iOS was the most significant factor in its demise. Without it, Adobe would to this day happily rake in the cash. It's also a good reminder of the positive influence Apple has often had. Remember that "no flash" was the "no Esc" of its time…

I read the comment as implying that Adobe killed flash by releasing it as a steaming pile of insecure resource-hogging shit, rather than as a secure, efficient plugin.

If Flash didn't kill your battery and expose you to new security vulnerabilities every few weeks, it likely would have continued to this day.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#102

Post by xg15 »

If I click the link from the article that leads to the webcache version, I get "yes, but embedded only".

If I click the link within that page that leads to the exact same webcache url, I get "yes, embedded and external but no ajax".

If I google the site, the preview text is the non-changing portion of the text only ("This is an experiment to...") - not even a "No".

I think Google is just trolling us.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#103

Post by teddyh »

dispose13432 wrote: post #93
jupiter90000 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting points. Kind of a tangent, I had kind of felt nostalgic about the days of the personal/hobby websites you appear to allude to that seemed so prolific before Facebook/etc, and wondered why things had changed so much. It makes sense to me that now someone who used to be motivated to build a site about their life or a topic of interest now may often just sign up for a service like FB and occasionally do…

> It seems to require much less effort for folks, which is perhaps why they do this It's also much easier to find readers. Compare: Facebook: become friends with your co-workers, now they see your picture Blog: Please go to jupiter90000 (that's how many zeros?).blogspot.com to see my once a week pic updates!!

I agree, but this is not an inherent difference of the open web vs. a walled garden, only a difference of implementation of the software involved. Indeed, the developers of the Web and its browsers were aware of this problem, and they though that they had solved it, using something they called “Bookmarks”. Now, as implemented, bookmarks may not be easy enough, and there have been other ideas, like RSS feeds, which tried to improve upon the idea. Just don’t think that this difference is inherent and set in stone. New features could be developed.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#104

Post by andrewstuart2 »

inlined wrote: post #100
paulddraper wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I understand the server-side rendering vs. client-side updating, and the design benefits of API-driven development. And unfortunately, a lot of popular JS frameworks haven't done a great job about helping with these. Closure Library/Templates was meant to render server-side and bind JS functions after render, or create client-side dynamically. (Interestingly, the historic reasons were performance, not SEO.) Rea…

[Disclosure: I work at Google but don't work on anything related to the crawler] All this anger aside, I'm actually pretty impressed with the world we live in and proud of my company. Think about how far we've come that merely crawling and indexing the vastness of the internet is so mundane now. Now we should expect the whole internet to be downloaded and executed. That's got to be a great security and integrity prob…

I'm not sure where you're sensing anger. The thread so far is a pretty great example of the discourse I've come to really appreciate on HN. Sure, disagreement may be uncomfortable or feel awkward to read at times, but I think it's easily for the best. I'd much rather have somebody disagree with me and give good reasons than just blindly agree.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#105

Post by m0th87 »

lprubin wrote: post #44

Another, faster way to see what JavaScript google can crawl on your website is the google search console (previously known as google webmaster tools). They have a fetch as google button that allows you to enter a url on a site you own and see a visual rendering of how google crawlers see your page. It even gives you a side by side comparison of what the crawler sees vs what a user sees.

My company has seen major discrepancies between what this tool gives back vs how the page ultimately ends up getting indexed.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#106

Post by scarface74 »

frivoal wrote: post #61
scarface74 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let's remember that while Adobe claimed that they could have gotten Flash to run on an original iPhone in 2007, that when Flash finally came to Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1 gig of RAM. The first iPhone had a 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. it wasn't until 2012 that the first iPhone had 1Ghz+ processor. The very reason that Apple could get away with slower processors was because Apple was depe…

I was maintaining a port of the Opera browser for Japanese feature phones in 2007. We supported flash in 11Mb of RAM: 6 for the browser, 5 for flash. That included the screen buffer IIRC. We ran regular desktop web sites under these conditions just fine (with 2007 expectations regarding interop). The experience may not have been great, but that was much more an issue of tiny screens without touch support than anythin…

That was Flash Light not real Flash. If Adobe could get full fledged Flash running in a 128Mb/400Mhz first generation iPhone then why couldn't they get it running on similarly equipped Android devices when they had the opportunity?

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#107

Post by nrjdhsbsid »

morganvachon wrote: post #33
nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They disliked flash for different reasons. Google for search and apple because flash games were too powerful, jobs wanted those games turned into iPhone apps. The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well. They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and se…

I modded you up, not because I agree with everything you wrote, but because I want people to post counterpoints instead of brigading you. I think you're mistaken about Google not being able to index Flash; they've had that capability for about eight years to my knowledge. I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.

Thanks, I might not be right about any of it but saying bad things about apple and google, or both at the same time :) tends to result in downvotes.

As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#108

Post by hlandau »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #66

This is a subject that really irks the engineering side of me. It's utterly ridiculous that engineering and efficiency decisions are so deeply affected by whether or not the largest search engine will properly index your content. Why is it that Google doesn't get flak for not discovering content that's engineered to send the absolute minimum over the wire, cache intelligently in localStorage and IndexedDB, and scale…

If you're developing websites which are inoperative if the user agent does not support JavaScript, your development practices are broken.

I browse without JavaScript by default, and if a page doesn't load properly because someone decided to implement not a web page but a web page viewing client-side web application, I usually just leave. Then there are terminal browsers like lynx.

Moreover, reimplementing a web browser's navigation logic for a specific site is silly. It will in all likelihood be less reliable than a web browser's navigation logic. Moreover, it will always be slower for the initial page load than just serving a normal web page.

Yes, maybe you'll make things slightly faster for subsequent page loads. But consider that initial page loads from search engine referrals may well be the most important case, latency-wise. And if you do server-side rendering with progressive enhancement, you can have your cake and eat it if you really want to implement your own navigation logic with pushState, etc.; serve the static page and enhance it with an async script.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#109

Post by appleiigs »

tyingq wrote: post #54

I wonder what Google does to avoid indexing too many pages. There are a fair number of SPAs and software like shopping carts that have a large number of checkboxes, pulldowns, knobs, dials, etc...that both change the content and the current url query params.

I think it avoids indexing too many pages by not triggering the checkboxes, pulldowns, etc.

Through Google Console/Webmaster Tools, you can tell Google which query params your website uses. But for my modest website, google only uses the page query (?page=3) and I don't notice it using the other queries.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#110

Post by camus2 »

coldtea wrote: post #52
camus2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe killed Flash itself, not Apple, not Chrome,not anti-flash troll X or Z on the internet.

Eventually, they pulled the lever, yes. But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap. If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...

Flash actually runs on iOS :

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/air_for_ios.html

So iOS do support Flash, just not its browser.

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