Ask HN: What is the biggest obstacle with surfing the web without JavaScript?

My experience was partially or completely broken sites which I had to interact with. Such breakage wasn't always obvious which led to a sense of doubt whenever trying something new.

Even as an experienced Noscript user and web developer the unscripted experience was annoying to manage

The biggest obstacle is simply that many sites fail to load without JavaScript enabled. These sites are not web apps, they are just displaying text. But they are probably written as web apps to display their content, even when they could render fine as just HTML and CSS.

What can be done to improve the situation? Nothing. Most developers simply don't care.

One thing to improve the situation: use an extension or hotkey setup to switch JavaScript on and off very quickly. I use Toggle JavaScript in Chrome. It helps.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toggle-javascript/...

The biggest obstacle is, as others have said, some websites simply do not work.

The biggest benefit to turning it off, though, is that sites finish loading much much quicker. Take Stereogum. Without JavaScript, you save yourself from a sluggish mess of a website that, really, is just text and images.

Do you really need JavaScript?

My default is to browse with NoScript actively disabling most JS. I'm happy with at least 90% of my website interactions.

Here's the full extent of my permanently whitelisted websites:

   apple.com
   cdn-apple.com
   edmunds-media.com
   edmunds.com
   newegg.com
   wikimedia.org
   wikipedia.org
   yahoo.com
   ycombinator.com
   yimg.com

In addition, selectively doing View->Page Style->No Style often displays content that would otherwise require JS.

For most of the rest I just say Fuck It and move on to something else. There are plenty of other sites out there, and life is too short.

Javascript is increasingly becoming just as important as HTML and CSS for a web experience.

If you "disable HTML" the web will be broken, expect the same for Javascript.

Trying to build every single thing in a way that gracefully falls back in the absence of Javascript is often extremely difficult (if no impossible) and always very expensive.

I think last time I checked less than 5% of global internet users had javascript disabled. Kind of like supporting IE6, the cost is just not worth it.

disable it selectively.

check the uMatrix extension. Living with it perfectly for months now. absolute no exceptions on any site. only allow what I trust and need.

There is nothing you can do. Some websites are built to work without JavaScript. These are usually sites built old school way - dynamic HTML generated on the server. Still a majority of internet websites I assume.

The new trend is single page web apps and websites with heavy use of JavaScript and they don't really work if you disable JS.

So it depends on which websites you usually visit. Depending on that you might or might not require JS.

Making it easier to activate/disable JS in Safari would improve the situation. Currently I use the developer menu to toggle it, usually for a substantial increase in speed and privacy.

Challenges are mainly based on js and/or captchas these days, and are required on countless sites.

In such a situation your access is prevented and the usefulness of a noscript tag is limited.

Drag and drop, grabbing copy and paste, many CSS transitions rely in some on JavaScript. Also all chats to my knowledge require JavaScript.

browse in incognito mode in chromium with javascript disabled. For sites which you don't visit frequently you can enable it only for that time and once you close chrome all permissions are gone. For frequently visited sites you can allow js in normal mode to retain the permissions.

The pages load too quickly. Thereby ruining me for all the other pages out there.

Why not enable Javascript?