cazlab.avaricestudios.com

The other day I was contemplating recursion and wondered just how destructive it might be when misused in a web browser.

I spent the weekend experimenting with different was to crash a web browser by "infinite looping as hard as you can." A straight while(true){...} got noticed but Firefox and Chrome and as such, were not run. However using a simple recursive function got a around this, and that was left was to do was to fill up memory and spawn lots of extra processes:

function ffuck(bar) 
{
	setTimeout("window.open('[FF]uck.php')",Math.random()*1000);
	document.all[0].innerHTML = (bar+"uck");
	bar += bar;
        return ffuck(bar);
}
ffuck("f");

The results of this were varied: in Firefox the host operating system would grind to a halt while Firefox slowly shat itself to death. Chrome would slow to a crawl, eventually producing its "unhappy tab" icon. IE8 did a very strange thing and attempted to download the file itself rather than render it.

Now I wondered if a normal recursive function could be so incredibly disruptive to browser behavior what would happen to an recursively increasing feedback loop? That's an experiment for another time.