I'm genuinely curious who actually browses the web in 2018 with JS disabled, though. Wouldn't 99.9999% of the web basically break? Like, if you do, do you only stick to a few basic sites, or?
NoScript makes a big difference with my laptop and a HUGE difference with my phone.
When I get a blank page, I do:
View
Page Style
No Style
Asking this question on HN will have an extreme selection bias, sort of like asking "who really thinks aliens are vising Earth and abducting people?" in the Roswell UFO museum staff meeting.
Javascript is the new plugins (so much host OS functionality exposed now) and it requires a new click-to-play. I'd like to think they'll eventually integrate something like NoScript into the browser as a standard. This free for all code running is too much now that the browser is an OS.
But it's difficult to get browser companies to understand something when their income depends on not understanding it.
Most websites are made of text, I usually want the text, not whatever program they're running.
I'd say I browse the web normally. Plenty of sites load normally with scripts disabled (and may even be more pleasant to browse). Maybe a 25 to 40% of sites I hit I'll happily enable 1st party scripts and a couple of known CDNs that'll will be enough to have the site working. For I'd say 5% or less of sites I'll have to actually engage and think if the calls to a 3rd party api are required or if the cloudflare/amazon are actually part of the domain and there for a good purpose or may be being used to serve up nefarious code.
One of the things to consider about the above numbers is that they only really apply for the first time I visit a site. With exceptions for when a site changes how it's implemented (or a3rd party script calls a new domain) which is nice to know anyway. (Or when the tool I'm using to block scripts changes (3-4 times over the last 15 years + another couple for not transferring whitelist data to new machines)).
I wouldn't really recommend my approach as something to get into for 2 main reasons. Firstly because the web does work much nicer when you just turn scripts on and say 'to hell with the privacy and security concerns'. Secondly there is a fair bit of otherwise useless knowledge built up over the years of doing this that mean this set up is significantly less onerous than it would be for someone who only just starts doing it and needs to look up every 3rd party domain.
Having said that I would highly recommend that you should install some script management with the default more permissible settings (rather than my more draconian ones) as it breaks very little, takes little effort to fix most of the things it does break and will stop well known tracking and malicious sites.
OTOH, web works faster with uMatrix. You can probably get an extra couple years of your computer if you're aggressive about disabling ads and superfluous JS.
The ones that do break tend to be the ones invading your privacy.
Most sites I use works fine without js. The few sites I need, that require js, are accessed from isolated, virtual machines dedicated to just that site. The sites I don't absolutely need, that require js, don't really exist in my world. That was a choice they made.
What leads you to a number like that? I can tell you that you're wrong, but I'm much more interested in how you got there.
Youtube needs javascript, and images or sometimes body text on badly-designed blogs need javascript. Most sites are fine. HN is fine, for the most obvious example.