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Whilst JS might be somewhat fast, you know what’s even faster?

Designing your application so that it doesn’t need it. If I never have to download, parse and execute the JS, I’m already way ahead. With better privacy to boot.

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I understand the appeal of rendering websites on the serverside, in their entirety (HTML and CSS), before the response is returned to the user's browser, which is what would need to happen if we all decided to stop using JavaScript today. However, using JavaScript in the user's browser to compute things like dynamic construction of the UI, animations, etc. has its benefits. For one, using the user's machine via JavaScript leverages their CPU and reduces the CPU consumption of the server. This can save cost, and when done correctly provides an overall better user experience. Things like AJAX (or XMLHttpRequests) are also a blessing and vastly improve the usability of websites. I'm comfortably sitting on the fence - I agree JS is used too often for things that don't need to be done on the user's machine, and anything that can be done on the serverside easily should be done there, but there are times when it is useful. Because of that I disagree with disabling it or not using it entirely.

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