Hacker News Reader

Comment by jypepin | Hacker News Reader

serious question: could you explain what you think is wrong with websites using javascript? Why do you refuse running javascript in your browser?

My understanding is that javascript is a part of the web today, and everything around it makes it easier to run javascript applications in your browser, making websites more powerful. I personally love this and a lot of website I browse would be worse without javascript (google docs, calendar, etc.), so I have trouble understanding what is wrong with javascript running.

Also, since now most apps are complete javascript apps (and not only some DOM manipulation), it seems a lost cause to try to get website optionally "extend" their experience with javascript. That would mostly just imply to re-built most of the page for when javascript is disabled.

View on HN

I have a completely different experience from you. As I'm reading this on my phone, most of the website related experience is better without JavaScript.

I also had in the past legally blind co-workers that could barely use a browser, so they had their own problems with JavaScript overriding defaults.

By the look of it: if JavaScript proponents designed car doors, there would only be remote unlocking and no physical key.

It's just bad engineering lately beign promoted as 'the default way to build webpages'.

The problem is that once javascript is enabled on a page, there is too large of a business incentive to tack on google analytics, auto-playing video ads, facebook and linked-in and twitter integration, annoying subscribe popups, etc. Javascript is necessary in the web that I want for the future but I want some standards for what gets run in my browser without me going through manually and whitelisting specific scripts to block out the 10s of MB of crap that get thrown at me every time I go to a new site.

GA, popups, FB, et al. all get done in with modern ad blockers, don't they?

Because it gets abused by so many. It's used to track, to annoy (popups, autoplay and all that crap), it often breaks hyperlinks (you can't link to content that is loaded by JS code instead of by clicking a link), it blows my data cap on mobile, it heats my CPU, and it drains my battery.

If I start my browser with JS enabled, it takes a few days and Firefox is at 100% CPU continuously, making my laptop battery last 2 instead of 5 hours, and if you start a packet sniffer, you see how all kinds of tabs are constantly reporting back to their mothership what I am doing.

That is why I keep JS disabled.

Also, most things that can be improved in websites (not to be confused with web apps) with JS would be better implemented as browser functionality.

Obviously for a real web app like google docs javascript is essential. For a web site (blogs, news sites, shopping) it's not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com