My default policy is to not allow JS to run, so my experience is already mostly Javascriptless. And, I have to say, my user experience on most web sites is actually better when I don't allow Javascript to execute.
Sites that function without it are the exception, not the rule.
I think there are three or four that both require Javascript and that I want to use badly enough to allow JS.
When I encounter a web site that doesn't work without JS, I just move on. But I understand that others may not want to do the same.
Anyway, I was mostly inspired by an article on how to set up Steam in a container - it has all the details, including how to pipe Pulseaudio inside (so in my case, Youtube videos in Firefox can have sound). Except mine is debian-based (so debootstrap instead of pacstrap to populate the container).
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox" --no-remote --profile "$(mktemp -d)
Yet I'm convinced you probably do enable js for various payment portals and govt/financial websites, and they often tend to go blank or loop out far more than the average site.
Apart from carefully cultivating a working noscript over years, the simplest solution may be to use a different browser for these sorts of interactions.
Reminds me to backup my whitelist. It's actually quite valuable.
I mean, it’s all the same framework-min.js working like a modern COBOL, not like custom mathematically significant compression or advanced dynamic P2P webpage distribution, right? Feels to me like a meta rendering engine could be created so none of the functions needs to be runtime evaluated or content be fetched by it or whatnot.
Well, presumably it is to some people, or they wouldn't be setting it…
Except it really is. Most websites are attached to businesses in some way. If you see statistics that the flash of unstyled content means 10% of your traffic leaves the site after less than a second you do what you can to fix it, and unfortunately that's often hiding everything until it's ready.
Pragmatically, most businesses would give up users who don't like tracking long before they give up users who care about styling, because there are just a lot more people who care about styling. It's an unfortunate fact of web life.
These sites usually aren't successful in that goal. Sure, they may be able to prevent content from showing up until the webfont has been loaded, but in my experience it's still extremely common for content to seriously jump around as the ads continue to load, especially on smaller screens (mobile).
So using "flash of unstyled content" as an excuse just doesn't hold up: users still have to learn to give a site a few extra seconds to settle before it's safe to interact without the content reflowing under your finger to put an ad where you wanted to tap, and breaking accessibility "for the sake of preventing FOUC" is dumb when you still have FOUC.
A similar tactic I've also seen that is even more unjustifiably anti-user is when the <body> element has "overflow: hidden" set until some heinous script that does it's own poor implementation of smooth scrolling can get up and running. These sites are universally improved by blocking such scripts and enabling native scrolling. This is one of the reasons why I believe browsers should be bundling together a large number of permissions that are off by default for every site the user has not flagged as being a web app. Google Maps has a good reason to interfere with scroll behavior; a news article does not.
Really?
Why does this happen at all? After all the "visible=false" is a styling..
Back when this used to be my default policy, I'd whitelist sites that I deemed worthy. I had maybe 1-2 dozen sites (e.g., my bank among them) enabled.