
I Turned Off JavaScript for a Week - ayi
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/
======
oska
> _and I could browse the web with fewer distractions—all without the sense of
> guilt that comes with using an ad blocker_

Never felt the slightest skerrick of guilt for using an ad blocker.

Instead I feel mildly virtuous in doing my own small part in helping the idea
of an ad-supported internet die.

~~~
devsquid
If not ads what do you want? Paywalls? Native content? Personally I want a
robust and diverse web ecosystem, not just pay walls and people forced to
alternative revenue sources.

~~~
vanderZwan
> Personally I want a robust and diverse web ecosystem

Well, _everything paid for by ads_ is the opposite of diverse. Pretending
paywalls are the only alternative is disingenuous too. There's plenty of
options, like donations, or Blende's "pay per article, get your money back if
it sucks" model, which seems to work well

~~~
devsquid
They don't work well in most cases. You can point to some very specific niche
markets where donations and pay per articles work. Just look at Patreon, its a
great service and I use it to support a few things. But its not going to
support most businesses.

For most business its going to be either a paywall or ads and ads allow for
content to be access by people without means to pay for it.

------
Majestic121
I have been using NoScript (a browser extension to black list all JS by
default) for quite a while now, and I don't see myself turning back anytime
soon.

Everything feels much faster, and sober without Javascript, especially news
site (looking at you, lemonde.fr)

I still allow some JavaScript sometimes, most of the time to unbreak site, but
if you start you using it you will realise that most of the JS running on each
site is at best useless from a user point of view.

~~~
mixmastamyk
News sites are the worst, some of them have twenty! libs and trackers on them.

------
pmlnr
wired.com, please learn from your own article and don't try to load 22 3rd
party javascripts.

[http://picpaste.com/wired_com-yt7ooXyu.png](http://picpaste.com/wired_com-
yt7ooXyu.png)

~~~
JupiterMoon
I read it with javascript disabled with no problems at all.

~~~
LiquidFlux
Could you read the comments?

~~~
JupiterMoon
Why would I want to?

EDIT Honest question. Since I've been disabling javascript I've not read many
comments sections and I've wasted a lot less time.

------
silon7
We need a declarative hypertext web back desperately. (I am running NoScript,
but I have to enable it for too many sites)

~~~
agumonkey
That's why I didn't believe parts of the article. Yes the web loads faster,
nothing can load faster than a blank page from blogger.com.

I now browse the web with curl | less

~~~
rspeer
There are a lot of cases where turning off JS is impractical, and I don't do
it myself.

But, to me, Blogger is a great example of a site that is poisoned by its
reliance on JS. Blogger is so bad at showing a page of text that it needs a
_splash screen_.

~~~
agumonkey
Only because Google neglected it. When blogger redesign landed it was exactly
what was trendy, heavy js, dynamic layouting. It was slow but at least I
thought it was worth the wait / the cost / the latency. A tech demo. Not
anymore, I want to read something more than be amazed and don't want to shop
for a core i5 to do so and now blogger looks dumb. Google could totally fix it
but they had other horses to ride. Maybe one day.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Neglected? It takes a special amount of skill and a lot of work to screw it up
so badly in the first place. The Web is designed to display text by default,
and Blogger fails at that.

~~~
agumonkey
Yes, neglected. They put resources for the js revamp. It was cute at the time,
not anymore, Google surely knows it but doesn't want to invest anything here
(for now). They just pushed a huge redesign of G+, supposed to be their
flagship, vastly simpler and faster (to the point of making it even less
relevant). Blogger gets the remains if anything ever drops.

------
z3t4
Sadly JavaScript or "the language of the web" is going towards binary rather
then openness. The big sites like Google already obfuscate their code so it's
hard to see what it does.

I learned JavaScript by viewing other peoples source code, witch was as easy
as right clicking and selecting view source.

Unless we want more people to disable JavaScript, we need to keep it open
source and transparent!

~~~
bojo
While I understand the intent of your post, don't most people minify
(obfuscate) their JS code to reduce bandwidth costs (on both ends, user and
company)? Even in todays high bandwidth availability age we still use CDNs and
the like to reduce such a cost.

That said, it would definitely be nice to see non-minified versions of code we
run in our browsers available as open source by the company serving it. It's
not like it's a secret, just a pain to actually try to decipher.

~~~
z3t4
You only save bandwidth the first time the resource is accessed. After that
it's loaded from the browser cache! So over time, the band-witch saving by
minification is insignificant.

~~~
simoncion
So, the answer to bojo's question is "Yes.".

> After that it's loaded from the browser cache!

Unless the resource changes, the UA's cache is cleared, the file is served
with incorrect caching headers, the cache expiry time specified in the
resource header is reached, the resource is loaded by a UA that doesn't
cache...

~~~
z3t4
Lets say your .js files takes up 5% of your total app size after gzip
compression, and minification saves you around 20%. Then you have saved around
1% bandwidth at the cost of obfuscation and more difficult debugging. And If
it's cached, witch all main-steam browsers does, you've saved around 0.01% at
best. So if you pay $10,000 in bandwidth costs each month, that's $1 saved :P

~~~
simoncion
1) I can play the "let's make numbers up" game, too.

2) There are _many_ , _many_ people in the world _today_ who access the
internet through what is effectively a 2G connection.

3) "...at the cost of obfuscation and more difficult debugging."

3a) Sometimes obfuscation is a desirable side-effect.

3b) Javascript source maps exist for a reason.

4) "And If it's cached, witch all main-steam browsers does..."

4a) It's almost as if you ignored the majority of the last sentence in my
previous comment. :)

------
aaronbrethorst
Disabling JavaScript makes the headline font on Wired.com much, much more
legible. I'm completely serious.

------
Zekio
Tried turning off javascript completely for a time once, but then a lot(Edit:
Don't actually keep count, maybe I should begin doing that) of pages are
blank/white emptiness because they do all the html in the browser....

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Sure, "a lot" as an absolute number because, hey, Internet. But I bet,
relatively, the number of sites doing that is tiny. I've seen it myself, but
it's terrible practise, and I'm sure it's easy to avoid those sites or, if you
must, whitelist them. Teach the site owners something, vote with your HTTP
requests!

~~~
Zekio
I have stopped using a number(Don't actually keep a total count, maybe I
should begin doing it) of sites, simply because of the fact they do it

------
pmlnr
Try [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/policeman/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/policeman/), that will make it even more interesting and show
you that _everyone_ is including jquery from Google.

~~~
loopbit
Didn't know about policeman and looks really, really, nice. Will definitely
give it a try! I love the idea of writing my own rules.

As for including jquery from google, of course and for good reasons, even from
the user's perspective. The main one, of course is that chances are that your
browser already has it cached (from other site that uses it), so retrieving it
and loading it is (almost) instant.

~~~
Guest192038
Keep in mind Google is blocked in China, so if you include jQuery from Google,
it's not going to work for over a billion people.

~~~
RobotCaleb
Is it really fair to include the total population of China in this statement?

~~~
TeMPOraL
As someone who currently lives and works in China, fuck yes. If you must, cut
it down to the 1% that speaks English and thus has a reason to visit foreign
sites, and you're still pissing off over 10 million people. Not to mention
poor foreigners like me who try to get some work done here.

------
moonshinefe
Whoa, this guy managed to uncheck "enable javascript" somehow? Glad to read
such a cutting edge article.

In seriousness, disabling javascript (and enabling it selectively when things
inevitably break when I was using NoScript) grew too tedious for me after a
while.

There are simply too many sites that require JS to function properly. Others
may disagree and enjoy clicking constantly to enable select javascripts to get
pages to work properly (or maybe don't visit JS intensive sites), but in my
experience it isn't worth it.

~~~
joonoro
> _In seriousness, disabling javascript (and enabling it selectively when
> things inevitably break when I was using NoScript) grew too tedious for me
> after a while._

I'm sort of inclined to agree. I really want to like NoScript, but every now
and then when I use NoScript for a couple of weeks I get frustrated with it
and disable it. Sure, having it disabled is also frustrating, but it's a
different kind of frustration and at least I can sort of use the site without
having to put active effort into it. Now I just use uBlock Origin, it just
works more or less.

~~~
JupiterMoon
I guess I have less diverse browsing habits than you guys. I use noscript very
happily. I whitelisted what I need for sites that I use years ago and most
things I do now "just work" (most is ~95% the other things I temporarily
allow). When e.g. a job application needs a javascript heavy online test I
open up another profile with no addons and use that profile for that that
thing. Based on experiences using browsers without noscript I think that the
"faff time" (for me) from doing what I do is less than the "waiting for
excessive javascript" and "figuring out that this site has overriden
scrolling/back button".

------
t0mislav
On old iPhone 4 I'm using, Wired site is very slow. But with JS disabled, it
runs and looks great.

------
jakeogh
Switched to surf+tabbed and default no JS years ago. Can't imagine going back.
CTRL-ALT-s enables it for the tab if it's necessary; usually not.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I currently am using Midori, but maybe I should give surf a shot.

------
santoriv
Sure. If you believe that the browser should only be a document reader and not
an application platform then go ahead. It's kinda like buying a smartphone and
then using it exclusively as a phone though....

I think the real point of irritation here is all the 3rd party junk that gets
loaded in that has nothing to do with the main functionality of the site that
you are on.

~~~
pvdebbe
I think that simple content such as blogs, news and the equivalent should not
be implemented in js-dependent web apps.

Web browsers are a platform for sure, but the simple content should stay
simple.

~~~
e2e8
It have thought for a while now that the web and correspondingly the browser
should be bifurcated into a content platform with no client side code and an
application platform without the burden of the older technologies. The browser
would provide all the interactivity and logic for the content platform through
implementations of standard html tags. For the application platform, the
browser could provide a more convenient set of apis sort of like plugins did
before.

~~~
tommorris
In practice:

Developer: "Well, we can either build our website in document mode or in
application mode."

Management: "What's the difference?"

Developer: "If we build it in document mode, it loads quickly and cleanly
and..."

Management: "Does document mode let us put the modal popover window that got
5% of our visitors to join our newsletter last month?"

Developer: "Well, nope."

Management: "And the third party tracker?"

Developer: "Again, no."

Management: "So we can't monetize or track how many sticky eyeballs are
consuming our content?"

Developer: "Nope."

Management: "App mode it is."

Developer: "But it isn't an app. It's just static pages."

Management: "APP APP APP APP APP APP. I hear you can go on a course to build
apps in less than a week."

Developer: _starts checking his LinkedIn for an employer who doesn 't make him
want to take a pickaxe to his own face_

------
bshimmin
Two things that caught my eye in this article were "Many people have turned to
ad blockers" and "A small but growing number of people, however, are taking
ad-blocking a step further and just disabling JavaScript altogether". For the
first quote, I know many people in tech who use ad blockers (but maybe still
not a majority?), but I'm pretty sure they aren't all that prevalent outside
of it (or why would advertisers bother?). As for the second quote, is this
actually true or supported by any real evidence?

~~~
andor
I found a study [0] from Q2 2015 -- before iOS 9 -- that reports ad blockers
on 16% of _devices_ in the US, and on 36.7% of devices, the highest value, in
Greece.

I have Javascript turned off by default and sometimes enable it if pages don't
work otherwise. Sometimes I just leave the page. I don't see it as ad
blocking, but as a means of reducing attack surface, tracking, and improving
page load times.

[0] [http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report-
the_cost_o...](http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report-
the_cost_of_ad_blocking.pdf)

------
tasdev
I've been doing this for a while now after becoming tuned into the tracking
and particularly fingerprinting being done. The web is surprisingly usable
with it off. I use SafeScript in Chrome which generally works ok. I use
multiple profiles in Chrome, one with just Adblock the other with Adblock,
noscript, httpseverywhere, privacy badger, etc. I use the normal one where I
absolutely must and that doesn't keep cookies.

I'm not paranoid and I don't have anything to hide but I object to being
tracked to have stuff sold to me.

------
msravi
I use uMatrix, uBlock0, and privacy badger, and am very happy about it. 1st
party scripts are turned on by default by uMatrix, and for those that break, I
selectively turn them on. Privacy Badger takes care of blocking cookies (first
or third party) that try to track you.

------
eridal
In Firefox, the "disable javascript" checkbox is now gone from the settings
--why would they do that?

But it can still be disabled in `about:config` > `javascript.enabled`

I used and loved Firefox since more than 10 years so far, but can't truly
understand some decisions they took.

~~~
tasdev
I read about this a while back if I remember correctly it's because people
kept turning it off accidentally and breaking the Internet and blaming
Firefox.

------
yason
I've disabled anything 3rd party and all scripting via uBlock. When I really
need some site to work 100%, I'll just selectively enable the parts that are
required for that site. The little button makes it easy to whitelist stuff
case by case.

~~~
moonshinefe
uBlock doesn't disable all scripting at all, though.

~~~
JeremyNT
You certainly can block all scripts with uBlock Origin's "advanced" mode.
There, you can block first and/or third party scripts as desired.

It's a common misconception that uBlock Origin is "just" an adblock plus
replacement, but it's a _lot_ more than that.

The one caveat is that there's no fine-grained GUI for white/blacklisting
_specific_ scripts. You can however white/blacklist scripts from _domains_
using the GUI, and you can block / unblock individual scripts by writing
rules.

------
lolive
Disclaimer: I own an ipad 1 (and love it!)

On an iPad1, your best choice is indeed to disable JavaScript. (Note that the
ipad1 has 256 MB of RAM. That sounds enough, but it is not! May be because of
a poor optimization of Safari on iOS5)

------
JSDave
I wouldn't mind some JS on this page to hide the conversations that don't
interest me. Also, why make a request for 5x more data, reflow, and redraw
everything whenever I click something?

------
9mui
I doubt if there is some alternate for the wonder full things that we can do
with JS. But Its true that at sometimes things are missused and in case of JS
its a top business now a days

------
e2e8
In addition to disabling js, another thing I do is disable styles. The web is
really quite beautiful and often more usable with the default styles.

------
wizzzzzy
Why not disable images too? I'd suspect they add most weight to the average
site and are likely just as superfluous as all the javascript.

------
joosters
Spoiler: Author found that because the experience was so great, they turned
JavaScript back on immediately after the experiment ended.

~~~
JupiterMoon
He ended up wanting more control but acknowledged that some elements of the
modern web require a scripting language. I don't know why he didn't just
install noscript.

