No no no. The problem isn't JavaScript or web capabilities here. It's the companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much much harder.
What frustrates me the most is that we can't individually disable web api's that provide no value to us. Yeah, that would give greater entropy to fingerprinting, but I'm willing to take that tradeoff if I could prevent webrtc, motion sensing, screen size detection, or web assembly e.g. except on selected whitelisted websites.
"No no no. The problem isn't unencrypted network connections, it's companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much harder."
Should we not have introduced HTTPS? Permission models on modern operating systems? 2-factor authentication?
What about Javascript makes it different to the problems solved by these other features?
Hopefully both, someday :)
On the other hand, many sites work better with JS disabled: they load much faster, don't slow down scrolling, don't break copy & paste, and so on.
edit: I should probably make clear that I'm not the same user you responded to
I'm not a promiscuous browser, if I click on an interesting link and I get an empty page because it insists on javascript I close that tab and figure I saved myself from wasting my time on a crappy ad-tracking-infested website, so many of which are lame anyways.
That being said I do sometimes enable javascript temporarily on sites when I am desperately looking for some specific bit of info, then I reset back to my default-off when finished.
I've been doing this for a couple/few years, and it doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I'm happy to have that reminder that a site is irritating me insisting on javascript for no good reason, more often I go elsewhere and that suits me fine. It saves me from having to worry about so many nefarious things that go on in this space.
Why not give it a try? Ublock lets you default disable all javascript and enable it on the page you are looking at with a couple clicks, and edit/revert your list of rules whenever you want. You might be pleasantly surprised at how few times you need to fiddle with it after you set it up for your important sites.
Also, good regulation is important to keep the big dogs on a leash and to have something to go after them when they don't behave.
Technological solutions will of course come, but you also need regulation, especially until the technological solutions come.
No, this is really out of touch with how crime online works. People that want to hammer a bank rent botnets, use tor, vpns, etc.
Banks get absolutely zero protection from the law in that regard. It’s “illegal” but completely unenforceable to the point of being useless.
Yes there is. A mugging is still a mugging even if the victim is "free" to give their wallet.
> websites are free to not abuse cookies to track their users.
You're free to not use such websites.
I dislike tracking and avoid being tracked myself. But this absolutely is a regulation and it's immensely disingenuous to pretend otherwise.