Hacker News Reader

Comment by xigency | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this alternative: disable JavaScript.

It's fairly easy in any browser to create a list of websites to ignore JavaScript on.

Doesn't disabling JavaScript these days pretty much break all websites? Or do you disable by default, then keep a whitelist?

Depends on what you define as “to break”. Of all the sites I use most remain very much usable even without scripting support, but certainly some functionality is often lost (whilst performance, on the other hand...)

To me, disabling JavaScript often tends to fix websites. I consider ads, animation, interactive menus, scroll-hijacking, malware, and auto-playing videos to be broken functionality.

I see some disagreement with you, but I am somewhat of the opinion that I agree (though I don't think it's a great "common user" solution.)

ScriptSafe is running and I allow some sites, trust a few domains, and the rest get, at best, temporary access to run local JavaScript if specific content I want isn't loading. I get the feeling the majority of sites don't even function without JavaScript at this point, and some intertwine their ad system with other "necessary" JavaScript, so it's tough to surf the web without some hassle.

I don't think this is a perfect or even passable long-term mainstream solution.

doing so breaks an increasing number of sites. "so don't visit those sites" is the common response, and is fine as general policy, but sometimes isn't an option.

I have noticed that blocking scripts makes the pages of most local television stations break.

But then I look at the list of 50 different domains blocked on the page, and I am not sorry--not one little bit. I don't really need to watch your little news video that badly. And I certainly don't want it to autoplay.

They are by far the worst offenders among sites I am likely to encounter frequently, as destination links from aggregators and social media. Newspaper sites are far more well-behaved with respect to their scripts, but also more likely to directly monetize the page view.

If disabling JavaScript allows you to circumvent copyright access controls, you're right back where you started ostensibly violating the DMCA.

Yep. I do it in a slightly different way. I have uMatrix installed as a browser add-on to help control for privacy, fingerprinting, security etc. But it can also be used for stuff like this. Simply disabling scripts on many sites' root domain and hitting refresh solves paywalls and adblock prevention on a fair amount of sites. For others it obviously doesn't work and nothing will load, but it works on more than you may expect.

uMatrix rocks. It can take a few minutes of fiddling to get a complex site working, but it's totally worthwhile.

It only works for some sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com