Still skimming the paper, but the JS attack appears to be processor-intensive (please chime in if you interpret it differently!). Any widespread, indiscriminate use of such an attack in the wild seems like it would eventually be detected as surely as client-side cryptocurrency mining was discovered. If you aren't a valuable target, if you don't visit sites that are shady enough to discreetly mine bitcoin in your browser, and if you use an adblocker to defang rogue advertisers, then you probably shouldn't lose too much sleep over this (which is not intended to diminish how awesome (in the biblical sense) this attack is).

That said, if there were ever a time to consider installing NoScript, now's it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

I'm being a facetious ass. But you know I'm not wrong, either.

https://noscript.net/

That trend might reverse if vulnerabilities like these continue to surface.

I’m not saying that shouldn’t be done, but business wise its probably usually best to instead add design changes for the latest smartphone screen.

The web isn’t a hypertext graph anymore, it’s a large JavaScript program with a thin html front now.

Most sites did nothing like that, but they did use Javascript and would break in various ways without it. At that time, there were a lot of people admonishing web developers to test their applications with Javascript disabled. Sort of like now.

ETA: I had to look it up - XHR was first available in IE 5 as an ActiveX control. The internet at large couldn't really expect it to be available but I believe that is where we first used it.

Initial release: March 18, 1999; 18 years ago

A lot of sites rely on JS to function even at a basic level these days and I think the parent was saying it's unlikely that that's going to change.

As the other comments point out, though, the biggest problem is that this is economically irrational for most site owners. The figures on JS-disabled usage I had when I was still at Google (3+ years ago now) were at the lower end of TikiTDO's range. It generally doesn't make economic sense to spend developer time on an experience used by 0.1% of users, particularly if this requires compromises for the 99.9% of users who do have JS enabled.

If you have a web app there’s no point, but if you’re displaying text and images and your site doesn’t work without JS, you’ve over-egged a solved problem.

(... While increasing perceived latency, especially for mobile users.)

(it's the more advanced version of uBlock, from the same dev)

Does this mean that all websites work? Of course not. But this allows the user to choose which sites to allow to run js. I'm not going to pretend that this is an easy task for non-technical users, but we should be promoting these kinds of habits, not scoffing at them. We should educate as many users as possible that they can still (for now) control much of the web-based code executing on their machines.

Then there was that time when I read on HN about Forbes loading 35 MB worth of crap (lots of JS too) when you first access it, sure enough it's completely broken with noscript too if you don't allow it.

Long live progressive enhancement and graceful degradation.

At least until we get a JS interpreter with proper permission controls and sandbox limits. Something closer to how Lua is embedded sounds nice.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

Chrome and Firefox's "intent to ship" posts both contain claims to the effect that there probably aren't any really serious timing channel attacks, which... seems to have been disproved. Why isn't SharedArrayBuffer already being disabled as a stopgap? I think users can turn it off in firefox, how about Chrome?

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-lan...

performance.now() accuracy is also being reduced.

This month's stable Chrome release will be outright disabling SharedArrayBuffer until additional mitigations are enacted.

It isn't exactly polyfillable.

This recent article contains a bit more detail on Site Isolation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/chrome-63-offers-eve...

> Chrome's default model is, approximately, to use one process per tab. This more or less ensures that unrelated sites are kept in separate processes, but there are nuances to this set-up. Pages share a process if they are related through, for example, one opening another with JavaScript or iframes embedding (wherein one page is included as content within another page). Over the course of a single browsing session, one tab may be used to visit multiple different domains; they'll all potentially be opened within a single process. On top of this, if there are already too many Chrome processes running, Chrome will start opening new pages within existing processes, resulting in even unrelated pages sharing a process.

Which suggests there are a number of cases where multiple tabs could share a process.

[1] Two pages are considered cross-site if they cannot use document.domain to become same origin. In practice, this means that the effective TLD + 1 component match.

Curious to know whether Firefox has anything similar in the pipe, since it uses a fixed number of content processes rather than a variable number of processes.