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Comment by deckard1 | Hacker News Reader

We'll have to dig a time machine out and go back to 1998 then.

I'm being a facetious ass. But you know I'm not wrong, either.

You are wrong. Install the NoScript extension and you can see your site without js. NoScript also allows you to selectively enable js per site on a temporary or permanent basis. This is the default way that I and many other people browse the web.

https://noscript.net/

Just looking around, general available figures for public internet (as opposed to tor) suggest that anywhere between 0.1% to 1.0% of users have JS disabled. These numbers have also been consistently going down over time. That's a fairly small number to dictate how a system should be designed.

That depends on your target demographic. JS is more frequently disabled among tech-literate customers, so a cloud provider's home page would probably benefit from working without JS.

> These numbers have also been consistently going down over time.

That trend might reverse if vulnerabilities like these continue to surface.

Right. It’s like designing for any other tiny group: color blind, blind, people who don’t read any of the 3 languages your site is already translated to, etc.

I’m not saying that shouldn’t be done, but business wise its probably usually best to instead add design changes for the latest smartphone screen.

The web isn’t a hypertext graph anymore, it’s a large JavaScript program with a thin html front now.

I think you’re misunderstanding. The person you’re replying to wasn’t saying you couldn’t disable JavaScript. They are saying the websites they and many in the industry develop won’t work like that and haven’t since the turn of the century. That’s what they were claiming to be not wrong about, and they aren’t. Turning on NoScript shows the problem but doesn’t solve it.

"Turn of the century"? JS was used for little more than swapping images on mouseover and changing/"animating" title bar text back then. The "you will see absolutely nothing or a ream of {{blah}} text" without js enabled really only became prevalent in the last 5-or-so years. Even in the halcyon days of jQuery usage you could get around quite comfortably without js, as js was still being used to augment webpages rather than replace them entirely.

It wasn't common practice, but fully Javascript rendered applications were a thing as early as 2001. That was when my company developed the first one that I know of. It was a godawful ugly pig but it worked.

Most sites did nothing like that, but they did use Javascript and would break in various ways without it. At that time, there were a lot of people admonishing web developers to test their applications with Javascript disabled. Sort of like now.

ETA: I had to look it up - XHR was first available in IE 5 as an ActiveX control. The internet at large couldn't really expect it to be available but I believe that is where we first used it.

Initial release: March 18, 1999; 18 years ago

Before XHR, there was an iframe trick that could be used to the same effect. We were abusing that to do streaming updates (stalling requests until the server had new data) on then likes of IE5 back in 2004. WebSocket eat your heart out! :-)

I'm not denying that the technology was sort of there (especially/only if you were writing a corporate app that targeted one and only one browser, probably as a replacement for an in-house VB/WinForms app). My point, which you mostly reinforced, was that it was not at all common for a user opting not to enable javascript to see a completely broken public-facing site until relatively recently.

That doesn't make the effort required of a developer to remove an existing JS dependency any easier, though, other than allowing them to see how the site breaks which can already be done using the F12 dev tools.

A lot of sites rely on JS to function even at a basic level these days and I think the parent was saying it's unlikely that that's going to change.

As a developer, it's even easier to test without Javascript: open Chrome Developer Tools, select Settings from the hamburger menu, and check "Disable Javascript".

As the other comments point out, though, the biggest problem is that this is economically irrational for most site owners. The figures on JS-disabled usage I had when I was still at Google (3+ years ago now) were at the lower end of TikiTDO's range. It generally doesn't make economic sense to spend developer time on an experience used by 0.1% of users, particularly if this requires compromises for the 99.9% of users who do have JS enabled.

I'd bet a certain percentage of THOSE were actually lynx/links/elinks users rather than no script users.

Culling all that JS can make things faster for everyone.

If you have a web app there’s no point, but if you’re displaying text and images and your site doesn’t work without JS, you’ve over-egged a solved problem.

(... While increasing perceived latency, especially for mobile users.)

you are better off with uMatrix which gives the user significantly more control on what loads/executed: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

(it's the more advanced version of uBlock, from the same dev)

The old NoScript. The new WebExtension compatible version just blocks, it has no way to disable js.

I browse with NoScript and quite a lot of the web works just fine, in fact. I can selectively enable JavaScript for sites that need it, and that I trust.

Why was this downvoted? This is clearly true. I am in fact doing it right now. I am sitting in an airport and clicked around 20 different comment sections and articles from HN so that I could read them later. None of them gave any issues. The only js that I decided to allow was from HN so that I could expand/hide comments.

Does this mean that all websites work? Of course not. But this allows the user to choose which sites to allow to run js. I'm not going to pretend that this is an easy task for non-technical users, but we should be promoting these kinds of habits, not scoffing at them. We should educate as many users as possible that they can still (for now) control much of the web-based code executing on their machines.

Well it's a severe case of confirmation bias. The people I know that uses NoScript like tools white list sites and third parties, that makes it seem like it works better than it really does. Further more they choose not to visit sites that work poorly. All the problems are visible as a new user, sure it's obviously possible to use NoScript but I need to white list too many sites to be able to say it actually works.

Some sites like NYT wouldn't even render text (!) for me by default with noscript on.

Then there was that time when I read on HN about Forbes loading 35 MB worth of crap (lots of JS too) when you first access it, sure enough it's completely broken with noscript too if you don't allow it.

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