One more example of why users should have:
- an adblocker
- javascript disabled
- addins disabled (click to play)
- an adblocker
- javascript disabled
- addins disabled (click to play)
Instead, I'm using Policeman ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/; similar to uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/releases, but the first is easier to use for me ) which blocks 3rd party anything by default.
If they serve their own JS from their own servers, let it be. Others (Facebook connect, GAnalytics an Twitter seems to be _everywhere_): walk away.
This obviously renders most of the sites to bare HTML due to the excessive and unneeded use of CDNs, and is a massive pain to use for the first weeks, but after a while the whitelist gets you to a friendly web level.
uBlock also runs in the background, just in case things leak through, or I quickly want to check something and I need to turn Policeman off.
While not necessarily related to privacy, I've found sites where blocking self-served JS creates a better browsing experience because it gets rid of annoying effects and things like scrolljacking.
Maybe we have reached the point where browsers should implement the top 10-20 effects in standard ways (that of course the user can choose to override). That would make it feasible for many web sites to avoid JavaScript entirely and still produce the effects they want, and let us move away from this “execute arbitrary remote code by default” aspect of web pages.
Most of the JS that we do on websites those days is really helpful for the end user and are the result of the recommendation of UX specialists. (form management, navigational help, async loading of content, preloading content, front-end browser geolocalisation, better responsive for mobile, etc.)
I use browsers at Uni without it and get the full experience of autoloading video, flashing ads etc. and think "how do people live with this crap"
> The load time goes from 1.48s, to >45s
Except when some idiot thought that he needed to create a complex SPA to render a blog article. But is the opinion of such an idiot really worth reading?
I have it enabled and use uBlock, and I've never had an issue with this sort of garbage getting on my machine.
There is zero reason to require javascript to display a few paragraphs of text. You might enhance it with javascript but that wouldn't be a problem when viewed without. The blogs designed by an idiot I am referring to are blogs that will display a white page with javascript disabled.
uBlock Origin's advanced mode supports this: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...