Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

rrweb.io

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#11

Looks really cool, but I find myself thinking about the privacy implications of using this, especially by default. Even if the user gives consent, it still implies recording every single mouse movement and keystroke on the site. Has this been normalised? Is this the new default? Food for thought.

From what I understand rrweb is not introducing or hijacking any browser functionality -- it's just using what's there. Whatever boundaries are being crossed should be considered already crossed, because firms that want this data don't have to work that hard to get it (or they can just buy some off the shelf tool).

If the privacy implications make us uncomfortable we might want to start not sharing this kind of information from browsers by default (this seems unlikely) or at least introducing some sort of browser-level controls. Unfortunately, this represents a lot of work and worries about breaking backwards compatibility contrasted with very little gain for browsers that don't pride themselves on being good for privacy(Chrome).

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#12
Even though I do agree that the total recording of sessions is not nice, such tools can be extremely important during early stage testing with your web app's UX. Especially for solo founders who don't have colleagues to tell them that they can't figure out how to use your app :)

Nice way would be to do some recording for a week or so. Get any sessions that obviously were quite long and the user didn't achieve anything. Go through them and try improving UX so the user won't get stuck there the next time.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#13

Looks really cool, but I find myself thinking about the privacy implications of using this, especially by default. Even if the user gives consent, it still implies recording every single mouse movement and keystroke on the site. Has this been normalised? Is this the new default? Food for thought.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#15
post #5

Hi, hackers, the author here. Since I've seen some people are talking about the open source idea and comparing rrweb to some commercial products, I'd like to share a blog post about the vision of rrweb. http://www.myriptide.com/rrweb-introduction/ Also, you will know about how rrweb works in this post.

May I know what open source license is the project under?

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#16
post #14

Very cool. So much better than loading youtube videos. Would be great if there is a way to annotate parts of it. Apologies if it is a feature creep :(

Great idea! As I said on the landing page, demonstrate is an interesting use case for rrweb and the annotation feature will make it even better.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#17
post #15
post #5

Hi, hackers, the author here. Since I've seen some people are talking about the open source idea and comparing rrweb to some commercial products, I'd like to share a blog post about the vision of rrweb. http://www.myriptide.com/rrweb-introduction/ Also, you will know about how rrweb works in this post.

May I know what open source license is the project under?

MIT https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb/blob/master/package.json#L...

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#18
really nice!

Few years ago, I created something very similar when working for validately.com - user testing company. The solution was tailored for our needs and was quite unique and rather sophisticated.

Below few main points:

- automatic injection of recording script by proxing original site / app via our domain (optionally user's could have inject the script by themselves)

- using iframe to serve the recorded page in order to preserve context and allow to display content on top of the page

- audio recording

- broadcasting in real-time

- storing all assets from a recording (images / stylesheets) to make playing back independent from original urls

Not everything was perfect and there were always something to improve. Some sites did not work at all due to technical limitations. But the technology was good enough so the company could grow and transit to webrtc based solution.

I am very grateful for this rare opportunity as the project taught me insane amount of useful stuff. Would love to work on something similar again.

Re: Show HN: Open source JavaScript library to record and replay the web

#20
post #5

Hi, hackers, the author here. Since I've seen some people are talking about the open source idea and comparing rrweb to some commercial products, I'd like to share a blog post about the vision of rrweb. http://www.myriptide.com/rrweb-introduction/ Also, you will know about how rrweb works in this post.

Thanks for open sourcing your work. I had already built something similar to this and other commercial products, but in jQuery. Really interested to see how this compares. I did see the IE11 issue. Are there any thoughts on what can be implemented for a fallback?

I know there is some MuationObserver(which rrweb used to observe DOM update) API's shim library, but not sure the impact on performance.

BTW, rrweb is also a project to explore the power of modern browser, so IE issues may not be considered in a high priority.

Post reply on HN