Engelszüngeln: What to do when github eats 100% CPU in luakit

I can't help it: As probably just about every other programming life form on this planet I have to be on github now and then. Curse the network effect and all those taking part in it (which would by now include me).

Anyway, that's why the last iteration of luakit bug #972 (also on github. Sigh) bit me badly: as long as the browser is on a github page, it will spend a full 100% of a CPU on producing as many error messages as it can, each reading:

https://github.githubassets.com/<alphabet soup>1:8116:
CONSOLE JS ERROR Unhandled Promise Rejection:
TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'navigator.clipboard.read')

Github being a commercial entity I figured it's a waste of time trying to fill in a bug report. And the problem didn't fix itself, either.

So, I went to fix it (in a fashion) with userscript. Since the problem apparently is that some github code doesn't properly catch a missing (or blacklisted) clipboard API in a browser (and I still consider blacklisting that API an excellent idea), I figured things should improve when I give github something similar enough to an actual clipboard. It turns out it does not need to be terribly similar at all. So, with a few lines of Javascript, while github still sucks, at least it doesn't eat my CPU any more.

What do you need to do? Just create a userscript like this (for luakit; other browsers will have other ways):

cd
mkdir -p .local/share/luakit/scripts
cat > .local/share/luakit/scripts/github.user.js

Then paste the following piece of Javascript into the terminal:

// ==UserScript==
// @name          clipboard-for-github
// @namespace     http://blog.tfiu.de
// @description   Fix github's 100% CPU usage due to unhandled clipboard errors
// @include       https://github.com*
// ==/UserScript==
navigator.clipboard = Object()
navigator.clipboard.read = function() {
        return "";
}

As usual with this kind of thing, at least have a quick glance at what this code does; these four lines of source code sufficient here at least are easy to review. Finish off with a control-D, go to a luakit window and say :uscripts-reload.

If you then go to, say bug #972, your CPU load should stay down. Of course, as long as github blindly tries to use the navigator.clipboard object for „copy link“-type operations, these still won't work. But that's now github's problem, not mine.

And anyway: Give up Github.

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