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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

OK, as apparently .js is the defacto thing to build cool sites, I for one will be left out here.

On sites not known to me, I typically block most (read all) .js at first, just to make sure that these sites do not leak too much information about me to external tracking tools, advertisers or the like.

So using .js seems to me a bit problematic in regards of people not enabling it by default (but this is an absolut minority, if I look at the stats of the sites I analyze).

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I use a custom hosts file (well, technically I run it as an internal DNS server) from Someone Who Cares to block most of the aforementioned annoyances: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

It works very well for me so I'd recommend it to others, if they're not already aware of it.

I've always wondered if Windows or other operative systems read the entire hosts file everytime they want to resolve an address. Maybe a big hosts file is bad for network performance?

It will largely be read out of memory, since it doesn't change much and is frequently requested. Scanning 64K or so won't break a sweat compared to doing a DNS lookup across the network to a resolver that might itself need to make a request.

Well, I think you can install something to use it without js, and they were just saying js would be for if someone wished to use it by simply using a webpage, with no install?

> OK, as apparently .js is the defacto thing to build cool sites, I for one will be left out here.

I doubt they're building it in JS for giggles.

In order to make changes like this stick my guess would be that you need to reach a tipping point before interest fades, and to do that you need to take away the browser vendors ability to say 'no' or 'maybe later'.

As you point out, people who don't run JS by default represent a tiny percentage of traffic, so would have to be a secondary concern to be supported later.

The first implementation of IPFS is written in Go, and it includes fully functional nodes, http gateways, and libraries, but they're also working on a node.js version (that's also compatible with browser environments) so that non-technical users can have ipfs sites "just work". (although it requires at least static content served from a "normal" http/html server)

One solution for people like you (and me) who care about execution of too much js could be to make the code free software. You then can allow all free js in your browser by default. See [0] for details.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/freejs

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