How fast can browsers process base64 data?
4 comments
·November 29, 2025danhau
> However, when decoding, we must handle errors and skip spaces.
This had me scratching my head. Why would a base64 decoder need to skip spaces? But indeed, MDN documents this behavior:
> Note that: The whitespace in the space is ignored.
JS never ceases to surprise. Also, check out that typo :D
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
cluckindan
So technically it’s now possible to hide a payload in somewhat human-readable text, as long as it base64-decodes.
moomoo11
What do you mean hide a payload?
Base64 isn’t obfuscation or encryption.
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/v8/v8/+/7208125 v8 changed yesterday to avoid the temp buffer which will likely double the base64 decode speed.
Looks like this was brought up there as a result of this article too, which is neat! And helpful since I was just messing with a node script that is heavily decoding base64