Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

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HN totally usable for basic functionality w/o JS.

profootballtalk.com works great if you don't want to vote or comment

macrumors.com great functionality

nitter.net happily takes the place of twitter.com

drudgereport.com works great and I rarely turn on JS when I go to the sites he links to, usually the text on target sites is there if not as pretty as it could be

individual subreddits (e.g. old.reddit.com/r/Portland/ ) are quite good w/o JS. But the "old." is probably important.

I admit that there are lots of sites that don't work, e.g. /r/IdiotsInCars/ doesn't work because reddit uses JS for video. For so many sites the text is there but images and videos aren't. Also need to turn off "page style" for some recalcitrant sites.

In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS.

> In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS.

Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers. A tracking pixels does not need JS. A font loading from CSS does not need JS. Personally I dislike those too, so I would still recommend using a blocker for those.

Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers.

Yes I'm sure I have that stuff loaded. But I don't care because it's quite ephemeral:

I exit Firefox multiple times a day, there's really no performance cost to doing that after every group of websites. E.g. if, while reading HN, I look up something on Wikipedia, or I search with Bing or Google, everything goes away together.

In my settings: delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed

In my settings: clear history when Firefox closes, everything goes except browsing and download history

No suggestions except for bookmarks.

So when I restart Firefox to then browse reddit it starts with a clean slate.

Comcast insisted I purchase a DOCSIS3 modem quite a while ago. Once downloads are at 100 mpbs+, does it really matter if I repeatedly re-download a few items to cache?

The only noticeable downside is when I switch to Safari to view something that needs JS, I then see ads for clothing that my wife and daughters might be interested in. I presume this is due to fallback to tracking via IP address. Of course I always clear history and empty caches in Safari.

Obviously this doesn't work for someone who wants to or needs to keep 100 browser windows open at once, for months at a time. But that's not me. I don't think that way, never have.

Edit: just had to add that sites like Wikipedia are better w/o JS (unless you edit?). I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?

> Obviously this doesn't work for someone who wants to or needs to keep 100 browser windows open at once, for months at a time. But that's not me. I don't think that way, never have.

Caught me. Tab hoarder here : )

> I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?

They still do those. At least I have seen them less than a year ago.

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