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Comment by Left4Yee | Hacker News Reader

Turning off js in turn locks you out of normieweb completely. Google captchas dont work, fat sites break...

This is definitely true to an extent. However, NoScript allows you to whitelist domains, or temporarily "allow all" for a site. Sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error, but for most sites, you can get full functionality with only first-party scripts and common CDN's (cdnjs, jsdeliver, etc).

Fat sites do break though, and I don't think there's really any way around that other than temporary whitelisting.

The Web is a lot faster for me now, though.

I've solved Google CAPTCHAs without JS, so I don't think it's a requirement.

Really?

Could you go in to detail on how you did this?

I thought JS was an absolute requirement for them.

Whenever I've solved them without JS, it reverts to standard HTML forms. Since it's in an iframe, when you click submit it doesn't reload the whole page, only the frame. When you've been validated it gives you a code which you can copy and paste into the host site. Note, I've only seen this on Cloudflare pages so far.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on reCAPTCHA.

Every time I've tried one of these non-JS versions, it gives me no evidence that it's working or progressing and just keeps setting up new comparisons for me to copy and paste the code. So I get tired of doing that and stop using whatever website is demanding it.

HN had a google captcha it subjected me to for a while. It did not need JS[0]

At the same time I have come across captchas that do need JS. I guess google offers both.

[0] if it had, I would have stopped posting here as I never accept browser JS outside of a VM.

Totally not true.

It does limit you somewhat, but a large part of the web, in HN, slashdot, bbc, most news sites, TheRegister, wikipedia, most of stackexchange, and a shedload more all work fine.

it is how almost all of the data collection happens though

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