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Comment by Jakob | Hacker News Reader

Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.

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I use NoScript. The web is much less annoying by default, and I can still enable scripts for those sites where I think it might be useful.

There are a good number of sites now which have entirely given up on progressive enhancement and simply don't show you anything without JS... but I generally find I just don't care, and just close the tab and look at the next thing instead.

I found that, usually, the ones that don't show anything when javascript is disabled are the ones loading scripts from ajax.google.com.... it might appear to be so because google is so much larger (or maybe Google did that on purpose)

I started using "Image On/Off" and "Quick Javascript Switcher" plugins to easily toggle images and js while traveling South America in 2014 to increase speed and save costly bandwidth.

Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.

> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster.

And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy.

I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'

Practically speaking, I think it's much more appropriate to just assume the admins are lazy.

I'll respectfully disagree with you.

It takes more work to have a bloated JS mess of a site, than it is to have a small, simple, clean site. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have gotten to that spot in the first place.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Yeah, but it takes diligence to know that.

Not really. It's very easy to get bloat if you integrate ad-networks, analytics tools, social media tools etc. willy-nilly without looking at all the resources they fetch.

The lazy approach WILL lead to bloat.

No news agency is running a plain jane HTML website.

Your kind of proving my point. If you add these things in, it's more work. If you make a plain html site, which is what these sites should be doing, then you aren't going to add that stuff in, which means less work.

I think you're forgetting content creators that aren't developers - although to be fair I don't see why you can't create an interface for the user that spits out / retroactively updates old pages/links/images.

There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.

> I think you're forgetting content creators that aren't developers

I don't understand what you mean by that. Content creators don't need to be developers for us to use simple, reliable systems.

> There is definitely a trade-off between ease-of-use and cost-of-use and I feel this gap is bridged by the content created by those who could not publish bare bones.

Yes, but I personally find the "ease of use" to be worse on heavy, slow, bulky sites. If content is "easier to use", then why are people constantly angry at slow, non-responsive interfaces? I see and feel this all the time, yet it's somehow "easier to use"? I don't see people complain when sites are fast, responsive and simple. Everyone's top complaint is that their computer/phone is "soooo slooow". Why is this, when we have extremely fast computers?

If you're hand coding it either way, maybe but, at least in my personal experience, it's much faster/less effort to drop bootstrap and jquery on the page and get to something acceptable looking then to hand code just the 50 lines of js/CSS I actually need. Obviously there are many benefits to the latter approach, especially in the long run, but it's definitely not the lazier approach.

> hand code just the 50 lines of js/CSS I actually need

That's the problem. If you do legitimately need it, then yeah, it might be, but my experience says you probably don't need that.

Quite the opposite actually, people don't know how to set up a website, let aside making a simple, static one. Many websites are created on services like Squarespace, wordpress (used by many as a CMS), CMSes, Blogger, etc. And then for who knows to edit text files, it's easy to start with a tutorial and end up with a +1Mb hello-world website.

I can agree with this. I was talking about people who know how to code, but you make a good point.

Or, they assumed everyone nowadays has a browser with javascript and don't care about people who won't accept to using js or even know about these people existing

Cannot help but chuckle at the irony when I forget to allow goog/gstatic when using gmaps and get the non-blank-page stating "without js all that's left is a blank page".

Well, that's quite unfair. JavaScript is also used for creating interactive web applications - not just tracking users. Really your attitude comes off unnecessarily aggressive.

Is it more aggressive than the uses to which JS is being put these days?

Obviously things like gdocs need JavaScript, but blogs and news sites and forums sure don't.

I think it depends on what the JavaScript is used for. I agree that blogs and news site should be static, but forums - and in general, sites with a high degree of user interactivity - can see significant UX improvements with some JavaScript, for things like asynchronous loading, changing the UI without reloading the page, and even nice animations (although many of those can be done in CSS these days). However, graceful degradation is very important - disabliing JavaScript on these sites shouldn't break them, merely impact the UX.

[Edit] "blogs and news sites should be static" -> this should read "blogs and news sites don't need JavaScript"

Agreed, enhancements are good (and often nice on a modern devices with all the bells and whistles enabled), so long as it degrades nicely.

There are exceptions where JS is needed. They are exceptions though. A vast majority of the sites I see now are web-pages that think they need to be SPAs. Sorry, sucks to be them, but if they didn't mis-design, I wouldn't mis-interpret their intentions.

How can one know that first time viewing a webpage? I just enable some particular websites to run JS because I know that they are indeed interactive web applications that I want to (read: have been constrained to) use. Also, most interactive web applications can stay just as interactive even though they were to reduce the amount of JS and CSS libs, fonts, images, icons, videos and other stuff that they thoughtlessly pull in. I disabled fonts loading on webpages and all the search boxes are now an "fl" ligature for me, though many times I see that it's not more cryptic then before I disabled fonts, because weird icons some people invented are just as meaningless to me as random letters. I've gotten used to the fact that an identity sign is for a meny, but every other day someone invents another one that now I can't click anything without fear and uncertainty, as most of the time no-one bothers to put a tooltip or a litte label.

This is the main reason why Brave is my default browser: you can set the default to disable JavaScript and enable it only on sites which actually do something useful with it. My data usage dropped something like 1GB the first month I switched.

Chrome on Android has this exact same setting. I currently have 26 sites allowed to run Javascript.

hackernews even works without javascript, the whole page just reloads everytime you upvote something.

Well, that's just the default way interactivity in websites works - submitting forms.

You could have used an iframe for each button instead of a normal form to prevent the reload of the page. Using an iframe with data: should take no longer to load than a normal form.

If only legacy didn't exist, and I can't think of a way to toggle iframe and form without js =\

I guess we're almost all on evergreen browsers now anyway...

FWIW, I just tried this in Firefox (set javascript.enabled=false) and went to my bank's website to see how it would fare. Firefox crashed. Tried again with no other tabs open, still crashed. Crash report sent.

OTOH, in Chrome the website actually works fine and feels more snappy with JS disabled. So, thanks for the tip!

Can you share the crash report IDs from your Firefox's about:crashes page? Can you share a link to your bank's crashing web page? I'd like to try to reproduce the crash. Thanks!

Sent by mail. Thanks for looking into it!

This crash is Firefox bug 1328861: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328861

Note though that disabling JavaScript can also slow down many sites. One good use of JavaScript is to detect the speed of the user's connection and then load in smaller and lower-quality assets. Disabling JavaScript can result in the default assets being loaded, which rapidly offsets the benefit of not loading that JS. Other sites will load in portions of the content first and use JS to load in extra chunks as requested, but load in the entirety of available content if JS is disabled, slowing down initial pageload enormously.

I can't think of a single website I know that uses JS to intelligently load thing via connection-speed sniffing. It's a nice thought, but it doesn't happen. There used to be JS fills for responsive imagery -- it was never connection-speed based, but viewport based -- but this is all browser-native these days. Some things might provide simpler assets via CDN-based UA sniffing.

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