The Most Annoying Website (Aka "the Power of the Web Platform")
summary
A live demo builds an "annoying site" that actually opens and fights with dozens of popups, autoplays unmuted speech, copies ASCII art to the clipboard, fills downloads, vibrates phones, flashes cameras and hijacks history using real browser APIs. It wires together window.moveTo, speechSynthesis, beforeunload plus picture‑in‑picture, clipboard, vibration, getUserMedia torch, pushState and the window.opener window‑redirect quirk. Browsers visibly freeze; quitting is the usual escape. The author reports sending it to a spammer and never hearing from that sender again.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Start
- 12:23INTERCEPT ALL USER-INITIATED EVENTS
- 13:03OPEN CHILD WINDOW
- 13:50BOUNCE WINDOW OFF THE SCREEN EDGES
- 14:02PLAY RANDOM VIDEO IN THE WINDOW
- 15:07PERMISSION MODEL
- 15:49COPY SPAM TO CLIPBOARD
- 16:25SPEAK TO THE USER
- 18:03REGISTER PROTOCOL HANDLERS
- 18:33REQUEST CAMERA AND MIC
- 19:02START VIBRATE INTERVAL
- 19:54START SAFARI PICTURE-IN-PICTURE
- 20:34HIDE THE CURSOR
- 22:22SHOW A MODAL TO PREVENT WINDOW CLOSE
- 23:25FULLSCREEN THE BROWSER
- 23:39LOG THE USER OUT OF POPULAR SITES (PART 1)
- 24:29DISABLE THE BACK BUTTON
- 25:03FILL THE HISTORY WITH EXTRA ENTRIES
- 25:26DO EMBARRASSING SEARCHES (PART 2)
- 26:52TAKEOVER OPENER WINDOW (PART 1)
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