ClientJS

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What ClientJS actually does

An early general-purpose fingerprinting library from the period when the technique was still being popularised, and still linked from tutorials written long after it stopped moving.

What ClientJS's maintenance signals mean

pushed_at reads 2023-01-08 — 1314 days, about 3.6 years, past the 1095-day outer threshold. Three years is where this register stops describing a repository as merely quiet.

DEAD in this catalogue is a statement about a measurement, not an obituary. The code is still there and may still compile; what has stopped is anybody attending to it. Read that against what the project is for. A passive fingerprinting reference from a decade ago can be entirely current as a description of a technique while being entirely unmaintained as software, and this register prints the second fact without implying the first.

No release was captured for this entry, which this register records as unknown rather than as none. The distinction matters more than it looks: a project with no tags and a project whose tags the sweep failed to read produce the same blank cell, and printing them as the same fact would be the register asserting something it has not measured.

Where ClientJS sits in this catalogue

ClientJS is filed in section 06, fingerprinting libraries, whose scope is this: The collectors themselves — the code that reads a browser. Read these to know what is being asked of you. An entry sits in exactly one section here. Where a project could defensibly go in two, it is placed where a reader would look for it first rather than where it fits most tidily, and that is an editorial decision rather than a measured one.

Filed beside it in the same section: BotD (ACTIVE), ThumbmarkJS (ACTIVE), CreepJS (source) (ACTIVE). Comparing an entry against its own section-mates is more informative than comparing it against the catalogue as a whole, because everything in a section is answering roughly the same question and the differences left over are the ones that matter.

It is published under Apache-2.0, alongside the rest of the Apache-2.0 entries in this register, and it sits with everything else currently marked DEAD. Read those two facets together: a permissively licensed project that stopped shipping is not a safer dependency than a copyleft one that did not, and a filter on one axis alone will tell you the wrong thing.

Substitutes for the same job, with no claim that either is better: FingerprintJS, ThumbmarkJS. The alternative relation is symmetric and carries no ranking, because this register publishes no ranking of any kind. The full ClientJS comparison table sets all of them side by side on licence, push date, release cadence and state.

What to settle before you adopt ClientJS

Its surface list predates most of the modern collection points, so anything built on it is measuring the browser of another decade. It is kept here with its dates attached precisely because other lists still recommend it without them.