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Does Google execute JavaScript?

stephanboyer.com

111–114 of 114 posts

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#111

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…

> 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.

I would argue that it is nothing to do with Google.

Google's official line is that that will index your content, even if your entire frontend is a big client side only SPA. The explicitly tell you to focus on having good content that people actually want to read, and little else.

As others have suggested in this thread, it is likely that they developed Chrome for this reason. My understanding is that they basically crawl the web using a headless version of Chrome, and take a snapshot of the augmented HTML straight away, after 5 seconds, and after 10 seconds.

Other search engines aren't so clever, and so the work to have your important content available even when Javascript is disabled is done so you will show up on Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, etc also.

To go further, I reckon Google would love it if you didn't do this, as it would give them an edge over their competition which has less advanced capability to crawl the web.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#112

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…

>They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime. Yup, Google should: 1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash). 2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target. or Get everyone to use an open, stand…

[deleted]

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#113
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can run real Flash Player 9 on a Nokia N800/N810, which had the exact same specs (128Mb/400Mhz). It ran Debian Linux with a Firefox based browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800

It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#114
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JavaScript in your browser when viewing the cached page. All you will see is an empty page.

Now I'm feeling a bit stupid, will slowly walk away and hope I can get by with "it's Jan 1st and I didn't get much sleep" as an excuse...

First, thank you for taking the time to stick your neck out a bit and share an example.

Second, thank you for responding to someone pointing out that you were wrong without putting yourself on the defensive.

I see this entire sub-thread as a positive; glad we all could learn along with you!

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