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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

Oh thanks for that. But don't say "of course" please. Typically the stuff you're looking for should be on the front page, not hidden away in /html.

In any case, I'm still waiting to understand why this is better than using any other search engine with cookies and JS turned off.

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I am not so sure why you are getting different results but the page redirects me to the '/html' section when I use the search-query and explicitly forbid everything (besides html).[0] And it is readable, even if css is disabled.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/Y2SdDFQ.jpg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16213956 and child

https://duckduckgo.com/ redirects me to https://duckduckgo.com/lite/ and that works fine with JS off.

Yes, I agree that the JS-less version could be more discoverable. I learned about it years ago when DDG was new, in some online discussion forum - perhaps even here on HN - and have been using it via a keyworded bookmark ever since. I never even visit their title page.

> via a keyworded bookmark

I'm trying to get this working on Firefox right now. Doesn't work for some reason. I'm trying to associate keyword "d" with duckduckgo.com/html, but instead I just land on duckduckgo.com/html itself.

I did it with right-click on the text box, and "Add a Keyword for this Search..." context menu entry.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-ht...

it redirects to it if you've got js turned off though? at least in my case, with noscript

Interesting. I just tried using it on the tor browser (which comes with noscript) and you're right, it does redirect.

However when I access it on Firefox + umatrix with all js disabled, it doesn't.

I suspect I know what it is. Possibly noscript sends some header saying that the browser doesn't have JS which causes ddg to respond with the redirect, whereas umatrix just breaks the whole thing entirely.

EDIT: I just tried going to about:config and setting javascript.enabled to false, and indeed now I get redirected. This has significantly improved my view of ddg.

AFAIK it's the handling of <noscript> blocks in the HTML: if JS is on in the browser, the browser skips the block and extensions can't easily activate it after-the-fact.

> However when I access it on Firefox + umatrix with all js disabled, it doesn't.

Be sure you have the setting "Spoof <noscript> tags" enabled if you want noscript tags to be rendered when 1st-party scripts are blocked. It's a per-site setting, but you can enable it globally in the "Settings" pane in the dashboard.

Yes! You're right :-)

Thank you so much for umatrix! It really has changed the way I use the internet.

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