Apparently CodePen 2.0 sends data to their servers as you type

44 points | by maxim-fin 2 hours ago

10 comments

  • midnitewarrior 5 minutes ago
    Look into https://www.fullstory.com/ , many major websites use this, it's basically a real-time video view of the user's browser screen. You can see where they move their mouse, how quickly they are typing, each character one at a time.

    I worked for a company that would have phone support for users, and we'd be watching their screens giving gentle suggestions to them as they were using our app for how to do what they needed to do. We never offered up what we were doing, but given users' poor descriptions of what they were doing, FullStory was an amazing customer service tool.

  • nseskin 1 hour ago
    There’s a detailed discussion of the same issue here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1rj1oac/i_planted_f...
  • cph123 1 hour ago
    For basic previewing I like to use https://htmledit.squarefree.com which has been online for years and does it all client side.
  • tvink 1 hour ago
    You're gonna be shocked how many input fields do this for various UX features :)
    • nusl 35 minutes ago
      Shopify does this. If you ever go to purchase a product on a Shopify 'site, and enter eg your e-mail address, it'll save it even if you decide to cancel and close the tab. Sometimes you receive spam from companies along the lines of marketing or "we noticed you didn't complete your purchase" type crap. Shit is rly invasive.
    • embedding-shape 1 hour ago
      HotJar and similar services are (were?) popular as well, and those record your mouse pointer movements and clicks as well, then displays that as an overlay over the application, so it's essentially a "screen recording" of your session of the application.
  • pdyc 1 hour ago
    i made my own html playground that is browser only and shares preview via url hash because of these useless shenanigans of codepen, its not as featureful but i mostly use it for sharing single page html files

    https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground/

  • bashy 1 hour ago
    Sent to them to render the preview pane. Same as pasting secrets anywhere on a browser.

    Wait until you find out copying content on a computer might sent it over Wi-Fi/Bluetooth for sharing on other devices.

    • maxim-fin 1 hour ago
      Yes, that is for rendering
  • keepo404 1 hour ago
    because this is how autocomplete logic works i guess? Frontend cannot guess language and completions for you
    • maxim-fin 1 hour ago
      No autocomplete involved there.
    • embedding-shape 1 hour ago
      Well, except for the cases when you happen to have the entire VM for your language running in the same tab where you program lives, and they both are all JS.

      Probably harder, and wouldn't work equally well for everyone, but it would be possible to have "guess language and autocomplete" entirely client-side, especially when it comes to JavaScript of all languages.

      • odo1242 6 minutes ago
        It seems like the main disadvantage would be that you have to load all the autocomplete data / model weights on the client-side and your webpage might be CPU/memory limited
        • embedding-shape 2 minutes ago
          > main disadvantage would be that you have to load all the autocomplete data / model weights on the client-side

          Not sure what "model weights" you're talking about, but yes, that is the trade-off. Although complete autocomplete data for the entirely of the JavaScript APIs would be what, in an efficient format, easily below 1MB at least.

  • tmpsvc2695f5 30 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • cetinsert 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • sejje 42 minutes ago
      It's obviously very fun; look at all the exclamation points.
    • dakolli 54 minutes ago
      Did you make this post under a sock acct just to promote this?
      • sejje 43 minutes ago
        Sock account from 2013?