I Turned Off JavaScript for a Week
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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
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.
The quote from the author is:
> ...and I could browse the web with fewer distractions—all without the sense of guilt that comes with using an ad blocker
Notice the gulf between your statement and the author's statement.
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.
EDIT Honest question. Since I've been disabling javascript I've not read many comments sections and I've wasted a lot less time.
I now browse the web with curl | less
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.
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!
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.
Sourcemaps are great.
Dead-code stripping is still useful but you can do that without obfuscating.
See http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost... and other similar articles.
> 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...
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. :)
I was going to say that clicking a link is supposed to be a natural thing to do, while installing software requires some degree of trust in who you are downloading it from.
for every obfuscated app there are 200 sites that explain in detail what you want to do. and another 200 open source versions to implement or learn from.
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.
You can argue the other 85% doesn't have internet access or isn't your target audience. However, I run a site that's geared to the US market, it's entirely in English, and 12k of my registered users are from China (1.5%). If I included files from the Google CDN, I'd be losing 1.5% of my users due to one line of code.
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.
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.
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.
Too many pages obscure content by showing ads, showing annoying popups (no I don't want your newsletter!) and by wasting screen estate on some "float on the top" menu you can't get rid of.
The thing I miss most on my smartphone is NoScript. Luckily Firefox has "reader mode" which helps a lot, but it sometimes doesn't show whole content.
Web browsers are a platform for sure, but the simple content should stay simple.
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
First, while I agree with this being the biggest issue, there is a little bit of nuance to your other point.
> If you believe that the browser should only be a document reader and not an application platform then go ahead
The thing is, the overwhelming majority of those applications are glorified document readers, with a bit of social media plug ins thrown in. It features rich media perhaps, but you don't need JavaScript for an image or video tag. Of the remaining applications, the majority of use-cases is forms to send over the web. This can often be enhanced by JavaScript, but is also not that insane in terms of needs. Then we get to the remaining use-cases of the "application platform".
There's also the part where most websites are just plain badly designed. For example, many sites that have a video that auto-plays when you open it, even if you open a text article and the video is totally unrelated to what you were watching. Worse, some of them even tend to autoplay to a new video, often redirecting your webpage, interrupting the reading experience. Sure, I can pause. It still downloads and buffers a video I never intend to watch. Similarly, whatever happened to progressive enhancement? Websites that give you a blank page unless you download three megabytes of JavaScript. WTH.
In one word: Frameworks.
In more words: Building HTML in two different places is typically not very DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and if you are assuming a lot of very dynamic content that want to update on the fly from the JS side of things all the way down to micromanaging the HTML generation at run time, well then all of your HTML building moves into JS to keep things DRY.
The hope for the future is so-called "Universal" JS (which is interesting in that its kind of circling back to the origins of JS (LiveScript Server) and ASP Classic): now that we have a somewhat standardized JS platform on the server side (NodeJS) we can use the same JS to build HTML on the server or in the client...
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...
I'm not paranoid and I don't have anything to hide but I object to being tracked to have stuff sold to me.
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.
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.
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)