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Comment by yoha | Hacker News Reader

I browse with Javascript disabled by default (NoScript), and it makes it much less painful.

Although there is the odd case of a completely broken design that even Firefox Reader cannot detect, it does save me many other issues, and makes everything load much faster!

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uBlock origin in advanced mode is good for this. So you can toggle certain primary JS scripts to get some sites functional. Then saving the setup for future use. Over time you get to the point where 99% of sites are fully usable while still blocking the vast majority of JS.

NoScript can do this too. You have the choice to activate certain scripts permanently (of course you can deactivate them later again if you want), or you can even activate them only for the current session and the next time you start the browser the temporary activated scripts are blocked again.

Except it's easier to just use uBlock Origin for everything. The grid approach is far more intuitive than the text list you get with NoScript (IMO).

Major differences are:

- In uBlock Origin you can allow/block on a per-site basis with one click -- you do not need to allow one specific domain everywhere. (I am aware NoScript's ABE can get the same result, but that requires more than a single click.)

- You can block on a 1st-/3rd-party basis. I consider the default blocking of 3rd-party scripts while allowing 1st-party scripts to be the optimal solution for cutting bloat with less web page breakage. Now keeping 1st point in mind, this means one could allow all 3rd-party scripts on one specific site, while keeping them blocked everywhere else by default.

- Whatever is not taken care by dynamic filtering will fall onto static filtering, i.e. even if one end up allowing 3rd-party scripts, the static filters will pick up the task of blocking nuisance scripts.

This sounds really nice, especiialy the possibility to easily block scripts for a single site. That NoScript by default activates the scripts on all sites is sometimes annoying. It seems I need to take a closer look at uBlock Origin.

I second that. I browse, guessing, about 95% of the public web with NoScript + uBlock on and unless the content that doesn't work without JS is especially crucial to what I'm doing at the moment, I'll just leave the page that won't render/work properly and look it up elsewhere, without a second breath.

But that sometimes makes for really bizarre experiences watching other people browse the same websites, cursing at how slow, bloated or broken they are, seeing that until now I didn't even know that the particular website that I've been visiting for years can do THAT.

The Bloomberg site is a really good example of it - for the first time I've turned the JavaScript on for it and... WHOA.

It's like every single piece of that 'extra' JavaScript functionality serves just one single purpose - to make your time spent on the site reading the articles as much miserable as possible.

I probably don't even want to know what I'm missing elsewhere...

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