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Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

jacquesmattheij.com

21–30 of 130 posts

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#21
I wonder what's considered external though. If I compile / minify my javascript and CSS and then use a CDN to cache or host it -- is this considered external?? If so, how is it different from trusting my hosting provider to host my site in the first place, or my domain provider for resolving for me? How can this analysis know whether or not the resource is external? based on dns records alone? because I can still use *.my-domain.com but point it to an external resource...

The concerns raised are valid, but I'd like to see the methodology for analyzing the data because it can definitely skew results.

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#24

This article should be read as ranty research, not practical advice. It'd be fine to fix these issues, but not at the website developer level. "If you have to use externally hosted resources such as javascript libraries then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed " No, you shouldn't. You should focus on stuff that matters to users, not existential internet security holes. Let someone e…

Your view on this screams "Tragedy of the Commons."

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#25

This article should be read as ranty research, not practical advice. It'd be fine to fix these issues, but not at the website developer level. "If you have to use externally hosted resources such as javascript libraries then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed " No, you shouldn't. You should focus on stuff that matters to users, not existential internet security holes. Let someone e…

Agree the advice is well intentioned and is correct (in theory according to what I read) but not entirely practical. For example:

"then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed (you have to hope that you are looking at the same code that your users see)"

Who exactly is the "you" in the above statement and who pays the "you" money to fix this and keep on top of it on an ongoing basis? And for how long?

In the physical world the different between ideal and practical can be described by my experience with production machinery. The machinery came with guards to protect the operators from getting their hands caught or cut off. The guards also came with switches to prevent the machines from running when the covers were taken off. But what would happen is the operators would want to oil or tweak the machines so they would take the covers off and disable the sensors so that the machine would run bare. Of course you would tell them not to do this, but they would still forget to put the covers back on or be lazy quite often and there was little you could do about it. You had production to get done under deadline and weren't likely to fire someone even though you knew there was a small safety risk in doing this type of thing (older machines of course came with no safety guards at all, operators just had to be careful at their own peril. (And good operators were impossible to find anyway so once you had someone they became a primadonna ..

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#26
post #13

Likely culprits are "performance analyzers" that grade a website and report an "F" (failing) grade for not using CDN-hosted common libraries. This is a red herring: this idea that the user will already have a cached copy of CDN-hosted jQuery is bogus. Even for a common library like jQuery: the number of versions of jQuery that are in use is likely above 50, and the number of popular CDNs that host jQuery is surely ab…

How would the closure compiler figure out what bits and pieces of the library are triggered from the html portion of the site? (I can see how it can track the javascript bits but unless your site is entirely generated from js you'd have to start with the html)

You annotate methods in Google-JS-Closure with @public, @protected, and @private in comments.

Public methods get unmangled symbols. Everything else gets renamed to a short name to save bandwidth.

Dependencies are specified with goog.require.

Anything that doesn't get required with goog.require or isn't called by a public function gets culled.

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#27
post #13

Likely culprits are "performance analyzers" that grade a website and report an "F" (failing) grade for not using CDN-hosted common libraries. This is a red herring: this idea that the user will already have a cached copy of CDN-hosted jQuery is bogus. Even for a common library like jQuery: the number of versions of jQuery that are in use is likely above 50, and the number of popular CDNs that host jQuery is surely ab…

Eh, I can fit one copy of libc in L2 cache, but not 30 copies.

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#28
post #25

This article should be read as ranty research, not practical advice. It'd be fine to fix these issues, but not at the website developer level. "If you have to use externally hosted resources such as javascript libraries then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed " No, you shouldn't. You should focus on stuff that matters to users, not existential internet security holes. Let someone e…

Agree the advice is well intentioned and is correct (in theory according to what I read) but not entirely practical. For example: "then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed (you have to hope that you are looking at the same code that your users see)" Who exactly is the "you" in the above statement and who pays the "you" money to fix this and keep on top of it on an ongoing basis? And…

Regularly pulling a hash for the libraries you include and alerting you when a hash changes unexpectedly is no work at all.

And if you need to be paid money to fix it then you have a problem anyway so one would assume that you'd be paid just as much to fix it when you're being alerted to it by a cron job as you would be paid to when you're alerted by a horde of users.

As for machines without guards: I've worked (extensively) in the metal working industry and the number of people missing digits and limbs has decreased steadily ever since tampering with guards, safety-interlocks and lock-outs became a firing offense so I don't think that's a very good example.

Re: Some analysis of the 1M most popular sites on the web

#29

Are modern updated browsers resilient against those "evercookies" or not so much? To be more specific: I have my Firefox configured to delete cookies on exit. Does that deal with "evercookies"? I must admit, never heard about them before...

Evercookies go a lot further than the regular cookies that you can delete per session.
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