You absolutely can tell what’s happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate
promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.
It’s not surprising if you haven’t come across the rollout of RCS. Google developed this feature as a replacement for the less secure SMS standards and aimed for a seamless implementation without causing user disruptions. This could be a rare instance where we commend Google for a change that benefits users, not just their bottom line.
This will affect you even if you switch browsers, because Firefox and Brave devs said they are not going to support this due to widespread privacy violations this change proposes and the closure of the web ecosystem.
Any website that implements it will be unviewable from Firefox and Brave, possibly more browsers if they join the protest.
This malicious change has to be stopped.
Cloudflare is pretty TOR-friendly, they even offer onion routing for your website.
You can’t pay with it at the till, though.