>Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it.
...as if much of HN's userbase doesn't already do that.
...as if much of HN's userbase doesn't already do that.
For the very few domains I deem absolutely necessary, I can always whitelist them.
Current sites load 20-100 external scripts, mostly in ads, analytics, and non essential content.
How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? My personal tastes tend to go not too far off this kind of design: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
If this hypothetical developer is really sharing my goals then he'll use the <noscript> tag, and I'll be happy enough with HTML/CSS.
For text-heavy sites, which are the ones I use the most, JS adds nothing I want: tracking? 3rd-party ads? lazy-loading? comments via disqus? sharing to social media? Thanks, but not for me.
devdocs.io uses JS to make an essentially-static website much faster to load and navigate. HN lets you vote without reloading the page. Shopping carts. Webmail. Google Maps. Rich text editors. Navigating around Spotify while the music keeps playing. Feedback on forms without clearing or changing something. Keeping a table of contents in sync with what you're viewing. Keeping changing data correct, like feeds, whether a service is up, whether you're signed in. Chat. Video calls.
And areas not yet widespread. AMP's speed (which would be inoffensive, I think, if intra-site). Layouts more advanced than CSS can express, like a newspaper's or the positioning of plaques at museums. Even smarter data compression for repetitive content.
And areas we're just now getting the tech for, like 3D simulations and peer-to-peer networking.
I don't know if I qualify as a skillful JS developer, but I run a website displaying pictures that works correctly without Javascript.
However, Javascript makes this website way faster, smoother and easier on the connection by downloading only the moving parts when clicking on a link, carefully preserving history so back/next works as if this script did nothing. When Javascript is disabled, an ugly white flash appears when navigating between some pages and rendering is just slower, even though it remains decent (my code is minimalist anyway…)
When leaving the page of a picture to come back to the album it is in, scroll position is restored. This is impossible without Javascript. History Back button is not sufficient: you might have looked at 10 pictures before coming back to the album. Sure, you can still ask your browser to come back 10 pages ago, but this is less convenient than just clicking on a cross.
It also help dimension images correctly, which I could not manage to do using pure CSS, unfortunately.
No Javascript tracker is present. You want Javascript enabled on this website because it helps using less resources and makes things easier to use. This is a 9 KB Javascript file that gets compressed to 3 KB and served using HTTP2 only once, so this is basically a null cost when considering how much a picture weighs (~ 100KB). And this is free software, for the sake of it.
But you cannot know this on random websites. Problem is, Javascript is not used like this in general. Unfortunately for websites like this one, disabling Javascript by default is still a reasonable thing to do.
Worse, visitors of this website that disable Javascript won't be aware of that, because things pretty much work as expected and I don't display a warning message.
Plus my bandwidth is a fraction of others and browser responsiveness shoots up...
I think you may have it arse-backwards when it comes to productivity...
/numbers pulled out of said backwards-arse.
It's very straightforward. I allow javascript on the sites that I trust to run javascript - in a protected environment. There are tons of ways to do this.
I see how long other's computers take to render simple pages, and I just shake my head.
(There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.)
About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap2it until last week, but have not yet found an alternative. Anyone have any suggestions?
Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them.
If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS.
I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.
No script. If the page breaks, whitelist the primary domain.
For most non shady sites, this gives you a blazing fast site with near zero crap on it.
Now I find uMatrix better but the first rule I created was:
* * * block
Since that was the basic starting point for NoScript.
Then slowly build up your whitelist of sites to allow javascript as desired/needed.