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by rty32 678 days ago
The web page is able to slow down my Android phone to the point that it stops responding to power button click. If you told me this page exploits a 0-day vulnerability in Android I would have believed it. Impressive.

(Android 14, Android WebView/Chrome 127)

2 comments

This. Unfortunately, I couldn't read beyond the first page, since it keeps crashing my (desktop) browser. Would be nice to have a button to stop/remove all animations in the page, so I could actually read the rest.
On my MacBook, Firefox (my usual browser) didn't have WebGPU, so rendering was mostly disabled; and on Chrome WebGPU was available.

Viewing the page in either browser was fine for the rest of my machine. But I can imagine that it's a heavy load on some computers.

You could say it's a denial-of-service attack on your phone. But I guess it's not exactly a secret that misbehaving websites that you visit can slow down your phone.

(However it seems wrong that Android doesn't set up things via eg cgroups or whatever to make sure that the browser can't hog all the resources. You'd want to reserve say 5% of memory and RAM for use by system tasks perhaps? (Reserve in the sense that these system tasks can pre-empt anyone else using these, not that no one else can use these.))

I do think such mechanisms exist in various places. CPU intensive browser pages (e.g. running an infinite loop in JavaScript) would leave the page unresponsive, but the browser and the OS in general is still fine. You can easily close the page causing trouble. Well, at least in desktop Chrome and Firefox. I definitely haven't seen one page slowing the entire browser since the IE days. On the other hand, if a (general) Android app is not responsive, there is also a dialog inviting you to kill it ("[app name] isn't responding - Close app").

But this one is different. I don't know the underlying mechanisms for the browser and the OS, but it almost feels like a bug.