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Detect and crash Chromium bots


Disclaimer: If you're here for the holy grail of bot detection, this may not be it, unless your UX strategy involves surprise popups and your marketing strategy involves blocking Google crawlers. We recently stumbled across a bug on the Chromium bug tracker where a short JavaScript snippet can crash headless

We prefer signals that are quiet and unnoticeable, that don’t log noisy events, spike CPU, or trigger console warnings. You can’t store bot signatures server-side, manage allow lists for Googlebot or your own QA tools, or tailor the response to the threat level. The moment a bot author figures out what’s causing the crash, they’ll override the open() method or sanitize the parameters.

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