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Comment by dmitriz | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, this articles confirms that investing into the no-JS functionality is becoming less and less important, with those major sites already forcing the user into JS. Why then would you invest your time and money to cater to the "eccentric" 1%?

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There might be 1 or 2 billion "eccentric" people that rely on old/cheap devices and networks, plus the visually impaired that need to use braille interfaces with little support for dynamic contents.

The article gave the answer to your question as speed.

Because of those 1% the large majority don’t choose to turn it off but don’t have it available for a multitude of reasons outside of their control.

Such as... ?

If you're referring to screen readers, I was under the impression that pretty much all of them execute JS these days. Am I wrong?

You’re not wrong about screen readers, no. I wrote a blog post about this last year[1] but I’ll copy and paste a list of possible reasons from it here:

- script hasn’t finished loading, or has stalled and failed to load completely

- application route is up, but the route to the Content Delivery Network is broken

- user has chosen to install a plugin that interferes with the DOM

- user has been infected with a plugin that interferes with the DOM

- user’s company has a proxy that blocks some or all JavaScript

- user’s hotel is intercepting the connection and injecting broken JavaScript

- user’s telecoms provider is intercepting the connection and injecting broken JavaScript

- user’s country is intercepting the connection and injecting broken JavaScript

- JavaScript code has functions not implemented by your user’s browser (older browsers, proxy browsers)

[1] https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-prog...

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