
Ask HN: What is the biggest obstacle with surfing the web without JavaScript? - zulln
...and is there anything that can be done to improve the situation?
======
paulryanrogers
My experience was partially or completely broken sites which I had to interact
with. Such breakage wasn't always obvious which led to a sense of doubt
whenever trying something new.

Even as an experienced Noscript user and web developer the unscripted
experience was annoying to manage

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open-source-ux
The biggest obstacle is simply that many sites fail to load without JavaScript
enabled. These sites are not web apps, they are just displaying text. But they
are probably written as web apps to display their content, even when they
could render fine as just HTML and CSS.

What can be done to improve the situation? Nothing. Most developers simply
don't care.

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mabub24
One thing to improve the situation: use an extension or hotkey setup to switch
JavaScript on and off very quickly. I use Toggle JavaScript in Chrome. It
helps.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toggle-
javascript/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toggle-
javascript/cidlcjdalomndpeagkjpnefhljffbnlo/)

The biggest obstacle is, as others have said, some websites simply do not
work.

The biggest benefit to turning it off, though, is that sites finish loading
much much quicker. Take Stereogum. Without JavaScript, you save yourself from
a sluggish mess of a website that, really, is just text and images.

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PhantomGremlin
Do you really need JavaScript?

My default is to browse with NoScript actively disabling most JS. I'm happy
with at least 90% of my website interactions.

Here's the full extent of my permanently whitelisted websites:

    
    
       apple.com
       cdn-apple.com
       edmunds-media.com
       edmunds.com
       newegg.com
       wikimedia.org
       wikipedia.org
       yahoo.com
       ycombinator.com
       yimg.com
    

In addition, selectively doing View->Page Style->No Style often displays
content that would otherwise require JS.

For most of the rest I just say Fuck It and move on to something else. There
are plenty of other sites out there, and life is too short.

~~~
hanniabu
You're saying yahoo.com uses no js?

~~~
ccdev
He's saying yahoo.com is on his whitelist of websites, so he allows JS to run
from Yahoo.

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borplk
Javascript is increasingly becoming just as important as HTML and CSS for a
web experience.

If you "disable HTML" the web will be broken, expect the same for Javascript.

Trying to build every single thing in a way that gracefully falls back in the
absence of Javascript is often extremely difficult (if no impossible) and
always very expensive.

I think last time I checked less than 5% of global internet users had
javascript disabled. Kind of like supporting IE6, the cost is just not worth
it.

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gcb0
disable it selectively.

check the uMatrix extension. Living with it perfectly for months now. absolute
no exceptions on any site. only allow what I trust and need.

------
richardknop
There is nothing you can do. Some websites are built to work without
JavaScript. These are usually sites built old school way - dynamic HTML
generated on the server. Still a majority of internet websites I assume.

The new trend is single page web apps and websites with heavy use of
JavaScript and they don't really work if you disable JS.

So it depends on which websites you usually visit. Depending on that you might
or might not require JS.

------
benologist
Making it easier to activate/disable JS in Safari would improve the situation.
Currently I use the developer menu to toggle it, usually for a substantial
increase in speed and privacy.

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tgragnato
Challenges are mainly based on js and/or captchas these days, and are required
on countless sites.

In such a situation your access is prevented and the usefulness of a noscript
tag is limited.

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limeblack
Drag and drop, grabbing copy and paste, many CSS transitions rely in some on
JavaScript. Also all chats to my knowledge require JavaScript.

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newusertoday
browse in incognito mode in chromium with javascript disabled. For sites which
you don't visit frequently you can enable it only for that time and once you
close chrome all permissions are gone. For frequently visited sites you can
allow js in normal mode to retain the permissions.

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dfansteel
The pages load too quickly. Thereby ruining me for all the other pages out
there.

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miguelrochefort
Why not enable Javascript?

~~~
bananicorn
Because JavaScript often unnecessarily loads MBs of data, without contributing
much to the experience - oftentimes being detrimental to the user's
experience, like loading annoying ads. It mostly comes down to speed and a lot
less annoyances on some sites.

