If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.
Same thing with cookies.
On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.
Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.
My experience is the opposite.
I used NoScript for almost 8 years, and then switched to uMatrix one year ago.
I don't need to enable JavaScript in most sites. And, if I need it, only enable some parts of the page. Most websites are much faster with this.
It used to be that disabling JS rendered web pages illegible. But good CSS changed that. So now you can read sites perfectly fine with JS. You can't interact, but you can read.
EDIT: Wow I just tried disabling JS on nytimes.com and it's INCREDIBLE. Reallly, try it. In Chrome I used the pattern [*.]nytimes.com. Not sure what that syntax is.
Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
From the wiki page, there are many useful FAQ/ guides/ docs. Specifically, there is a link to a decent guide:
http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...
edit: using both is redundant
In fairness to gorhill it's a couple of years since I last looked at uMatrix so it may be much improved.
uMatrix handles network stuff (blocking css, js, media, etc).
uBlock also handles network stuff, but the difference is that uBlock can also block specific elements on the page, eg, divs by id or class.
If you block all JS and CSS with umatrix, you can still read articles by pressing the "reader view" button in Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
Good: HN works well and handles the downgrade gracefully (ex: upvoting becomes a POST rather than AJAX).
Bad: The original Reddit site works ok but the new React based one one fails miserably as it shows a loading screen that never changes.
(Also, they probably save money on electricity by externalizing more and more processing to users.)
But reddit seems to know they suck at websites: you can still access https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever> and even https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever>/.compact for the old site and the old old site.
People who are also writing content-based apps and want to write once but still obtain native speeds on mobile? The lack of right-click functionality is just bad design, not React's fault.
With browsers and heavy JavaScript frameworks? That's an oxymoron right there.
The truth is, people/organizations doing this simply put other concerns above user experience and friendliness.
React is fine for browser-based line-of-business (and I guess also collaboration) apps; for content, not so much because you have to go through hoops to parse content into React's vdom [1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50420248/how-to-parse-a-...
Reactive Native's primary selling point (and nature of existence) is that it uses native components instead of wrapping a webview. This is the most obvious, relevant, and hyped detail of React Native. So your statement, "React Native is a browser" implying the same performance penalties as visiting as a website or using Cordova/PhoneGap, is false.
There is nothing native about a website which has actual lagging while I scroll when the previous version could do it just fine in desktop mode.
The irony is, Reddit on mobile is god-awful slow. It takes a good 5-10 seconds of displaying a spinner just to show me a kilobyte of text (self-post or linked comment). I no longer click Reddit links on mobile for this reason.
Reddit has got to have talented people working for it. But whatever they're doing that results in a 10-second spinner to display pure text is "Mongo DB is web-scale" levels of comedy.
https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv
I think there needs to be a movement to bring the WWW back to basic, readable, low-JS, animation-free, content-based sites.
I don't think there is a list, but I'd say it heavily depends on your browsing behaviour. In my case the vast majority of web sites that I access randomly (mostly trough some feed or aggregator) are text based and actually more pleasant to use without js: Faster, no jumping around of content, no obnoxious subscribe modals, almost zero ads, etc. If it doesn't work without js, I usually just close the tab. I hold the view, that if something is important enough for me to care, it will reach me in some form or the other eventually.
But if you are mostly about multi media content, checking out tech demos or similar, you are going to have a bad time.
You can use the "Quick JS switcher" plugin to easily enable js for a page
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-js-swit...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...
I'm quite lenient in white listing, because for me personally disabling js is mostly about performance. If I'm interested enough in a web sites offering and see the utility of it requiring js, I'm also willing to wait a little. But I'm not patient by default