

Too much JavaScript - igvadaimon
http://latviancoder.com/story/too-much-javascript

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malandrew

        "The amount of users with javascript disabled in their 
        browsers is around 1% or even less. Who are those people? 
        I always imagined them like some old-school security-
        obsessed maniacs." 
    

I'm one of those people and I write lots of JavaScript for a living at a
company that writes mostly JavaScript. The truth is that the overwhelming
majority of sites don't use JavaScript for anything useful. In fact a lot is
actively not in your interests. 90% of the time most of the JS I encounter in
SafeScript is metrics collection and adware. I also block javascript because I
like to have a lot of tabs open and 100 tabs running javascript can easily
send my fans into overdrive and kill my battery life. For the most part, I
usually just whitelist domains I trust.

One day I wouldn't mind sitting down to write a browser plugin that is a lot
smarter about executing JavaScript. I'm doing a lot with AST parsing with
esprima these days so hopefully that experience will provide some insights
over time. The truth is that the browser is supposed to be a user-agent and
most need a lot more work still to act in the best interests of the users
using them.

I especially would really love to build a LittleSnitch for browsers that
overrides the browser's XHR, WebSockets and other networking features to
disable timeouts and give you the option of whitelisting GETs, PUTS and POSTS
to certain routes.

Furthermore, I think it would also be nice to be able to figure out what parts
of a page touched certain elements and decide to block the javascript that
manipulated that part of the page.

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theandrewbailey
If it can be done without Javascript, it's probably better to do without it.
Not only for compatibility, but it will be faster, too. Serving an empty div
with a lot of Javascript to AJAX/JSON things in doesn't make everything
better.

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mschuster91
The real question is, why do people still disable Javascript? (And, why do
browsers offer this option)

~~~
AndyBaker
I use noscript, then white-list sites I trust (or am temporarily curious
about).

The web runs so much faster.

~~~
TophWells
No flashy adverts - static images are so much less distracting. A few places
use animated GIFs, but they're a minority among minorities.

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mantrax3
1) You were wondering why people disable JS.

2) You were making "THIS FACE" at _one of them_.

3) You _didn 't ask him why_ did he disable JS.

4) You're about to remake your site based on conclusions drawn by _a sample of
one_.

Well, god damn it dude. That's not how thinking works!

~~~
igvadaimon
Well I did ask him, it looks like he's pretty religious about it.

