Leave JS off by default. Whitelist sites that absolutely need it. Running completely untrusted foreign code on your hardware has been, is, and likely will continue to be a source of security problems.
As a bonus, you get to enjoy much faster-loading, nearly ad-free and cruft-free pages on almost every site. Now couldn't be a better time to try it out.
There are some other minor pain points though. Why can't I collapse comments here on HN without JavaScript?
There are more examples of minor issues that seem to be completely solveable by a statically defined markup language. Mozilla, where are you when we need you?
Allowing JavaScript only on certain sites is not a good solution. First, it leads to unfair conditions and thus centralization. Second, the appification of the web including it's consequence of ever increasing dependency on certain software that is outside of the control of the users continues.
Features like this could easily be a declarative feature in HTML. e.g. something like:
<div class="comment_wrapper">
<action type="show,hide" for="foo">
<img ...> <!-- or whatever -->
</action>
<div id="foo" class="comment"> ... </div>
</div>
> input:checked + div { display: none; }
Some people don’t like that either though. :/
Only thing which I'm missing is to run my custom scripts on page I disable javascript on. I am able to fix quite a bit with stylus but not everything.
Also it's so weird to me that firefox which cares about privacy(?) doesn't have domain js blocking like chrome does and I have to use 3rd party addons.
Instead, I recommend using uBlock Origin in "medium mode". Medium mode allows first-party scripts to run but blocks all third-party scripts by default.
In medium mode, around 75% of pages work without any additional finagling and the others can be fixed by enabling selective script sources only on that specific host. I find it a reasonable middle-ground.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
If that's all you use uMatrix for, you can remove it and get all that functionality with uBlock Origin alone.
It has a small learning curve if you understand a bit of how the web works.