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JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

security.googleblog.com

341–350 of 529 posts

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#341
I don't get the same behaviour as what is shown in the screenshots of the google blog. If I go to Google, disable JS and click on 'sign in' I go to an 'account chooser' page. From there, no matter what I do I end up being redirected to that same page. Not great UX from Google if others experience the same as me.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#342

I'm genuinely curious who actually browses the web in 2018 with JS disabled, though. Wouldn't 99.9999% of the web basically break? Like, if you do, do you only stick to a few basic sites, or?

I do.

Most sites I use works fine without js. The few sites I need, that require js, are accessed from isolated, virtual machines dedicated to just that site. The sites I don't absolutely need, that require js, don't really exist in my world. That was a choice they made.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#344

I try hard not to be a luddite as I age, but this level of automation and machine learning is so concerning. It is SO frustrating to accidentally appear as a bot and get stuck at the mercy of an automated system. I was on some random site the other day and spent 3+ minutes solving Captchas until it finally let me through. I thought I was losing my mind. I don't spam, I don't automate queries, I come from an IP that h…

Google captchas appears (to me) to be designed to identify individuals, not to separate anonymous users from machines. Google want to know exactly who you are, when they harvest your visits and behavior on almost all sites on the Internet.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#345
post #71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a better solution for differentiating yourself as an actual user from a robot spammer?

Being allowed to pay for services with money, rather than being required to pay for services with your personal data. I browse the web via a proxy when I'm on public wifi, and Google is nigh unusable with how many captchas it forces you to solve to do a single Google search. Fortunately Bing and DDG still work, for now.

I would absolutely subscribe to a email service with a 5/10/15 dollars one time payment.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#346
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great. Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.

What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.

Firefox 63.0. Fibre internet connection. 3.1 GHz Mac, 16 GB RAM.

It's tricky to share a screen recording because there's personal information. But I just did two for my own curiosity. From a fresh load, once the "Loading Gmail" screen has gone away, it took 8 seconds and 11 seconds respectively from clicking 'Compose' to having a new window open.

Maybe there is variability. There are a million combinations of factors out there. I suppose as an engineer you make the trade off of "do I hope for the best case" vs "do I make something that works for a broad audience". The previous version shows that they can make something that works for my own anecdatapoint if they want to.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great. Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.

> A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. Where? The only one I can trigger that does any kind of network is in the inbox, and that's only to get some icons. The text for the options is already loaded.

I'm talking about the RSVP box for integrated calendar invites. Not a right-click context menu.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#348
post #70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.

I have a lot of issues with google apps for business. Sometimes I have to refresh the browser 5-6 times before it will display any email in the primary inbox as well. It's just horrible to use in firefox (in arch linux) and I'm currently looking for a new provider. I might just go all in and use protonmail.

Protonmail is great but doesnt offer custom domains. If you need domains people mostly mention fastmail but i think there are far better choices like mailbox.org and kolabnow. Mailbox does not look like much from their homepage but it has awesome web client and it extremly reliable private provider thats in bussiness from 90s. I had account there for last 5 years without single problem.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by ‘cred stuffing’ you mean brute forcing accounts, that’s what short lockouts and 2 factor authentication are for. JavaScript is just a layer of obfuscation and doesn’t fundamentally help.

Credential stuffing more commonly refers to the practice of getting valid sets of creds from various password database dumps and retrying them across common/popular systems. 2FA is a good defence against it, but lockouts are less as they attacker will be going broad and not deep (could be a single request per user account)

I don’t see how JavaScript is anything more than a bandaid for that. The assumption is the attacker has the usercode and password combination and then you want to prevent him from logging in.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by ‘cred stuffing’ you mean brute forcing accounts, that’s what short lockouts and 2 factor authentication are for. JavaScript is just a layer of obfuscation and doesn’t fundamentally help.

Credential stuffing more commonly refers to the practice of getting valid sets of creds from various password database dumps and retrying them across common/popular systems. 2FA is a good defence against it, but lockouts are less as they attacker will be going broad and not deep (could be a single request per user account)

Ip based lockouts as opposed to account based lockouts do better against cred stuffing. Because there is a cost to getting more IP adresses. Maybe carrier grade NAT would lead to too many false positives?
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