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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> Lets be real, you need to be using JavaScript for the internet to be functional,

Nonsense. I use w3m for browsing and much more than 90 percent of the web works fine. Fully 100 percemt of "the internet" works fine, because that has nothing to do with JavaScript. Please stop over-dramatising and catastrophising as a way to throw cold water on what is a very good security practice. More than one medium security environment I've worked in recently don't allow js (although admittedly the sites we are allowed to access from there are limited).

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Wow, talk about proving the parent's point.

I just read the top 100 website list and went to some of the top 20, like Yahoo, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, and Live.com (Microsoft).

YouTube, Twitter and Instagram don't work at all. Live.com wouldn't let me log in without JS. Amazon worked until checkout. Yahoo worked until login.

I think you are incorrect with your "nonsense" judgement, as this top-10 sampling is pretty sensible.

EDIT: `ewzimm` makes a good criticism of my analysis: these aren't necessarily the top sites used by Tor. However, how many Tor users (in authoritarian countries or just regular users) don't use it to visit the banned sites on the Top-100 list?

There are alternatives that will work without JS though.. obviously the majority of people use it by default, but if you don't want to have it enabled there is plenty of other options.

If I told you I don’t listen to the Billboard top 100 songs, would you say “nonsense, you don’t listen to music?”

I also prefer w3m and find most of the web much better as text only, switching over to another browser when I want video or some other JS feature. Or I can use something like youtube-dl to fetch a video. And there’s much more out there than the top 100 websites.

> If I told you I don’t listen to the Billboard top 100 songs, would you say “nonsense, you don’t listen to music?”

No, but the reponse is more like: I only listen to Indie, Billboard isn't music.

The vast majority of internet traffic, e.g., the most popular sites, mostly require JS. If you only visit obscure indie-rock sites, then fine, but we're talking about the masses, not the small niche exceptions.

It’s true that most people will likely stick to the most popular websites, but how likely are they to use Tor, especially self-configured outside the Tor browser? I’d bet the people who would do that are much more likely to spend more time outside the most popular websites.

That's a good point: this discussion is in the context of TOR, so that does self-select to some extent. It would make more sense for my argument if I knew what are the top-20 sites used by TOR and their JS requirements. I know people use Tor for Twitter in Turkey, so there's a problem right there!

To be fair, the websites you listed are extremely difficult to use anonymously with or without JS enabled. Most of the popular sites go pretty far out of their way to attach you to an identity that can be used to identify you outside their website.

If you’re using Tor to do your Amazon shopping - I wouldn’t recommend using the same environment to do anything where your anonymity being compromised could put you in danger since you just gave Amazon your credit card and mailing address.

> YouTube, Twitter and Instagram

We clearly have very different lifestyles and values. For me that's the dank basement of the internet,

That's perfectly fine.

It however does not matter for the large majority of people who use those top 100 or even top 100,000 websites or even top 1,000,000 websites, and do not have the education, skill or time to learn about all the alternatives, if there are even any. It doesn't matter for the people living under repressive regimes who want to inform themselves on foreign news sites, access foreign NGO sites, or even watch things on youtube or look and/or participate in social media. And so on...

A large part of the web is not functional without js, and just because you chose to not use that part of the web (much) doesn't invalidate that point.

So I'd politely suggest you may tone it down a little when it comes to calling "nonsense".

> and do not have the education, skill or time to learn about all the alternatives,

With respect, this is hacker news. When I converse with people here I do so with a different expectation of intellect and curiosity. There are voices here who excuse technological abuses by appeal to the ignorance of "the masses" - completely missing that there is a different spirit going on in the sub-text of innovation and entrepreneurialism here. If, as you claim, the majority are using defective technologies, then that is a bigger problem, not something to be celebrated. They deserve better and it's our job to help them get that.

This is mostly the fault of lazy and ignorant front end developers.

I doubt that. Monetization is a goal of most of these platforms, which makes the JS and privacy-hostile stuff absolutely intentional and implemented with malice aforethought. There's no reason to require client-side computing for the vast majority of sites, and the remainder are relatively niche webapps. Media-viewing sites aren't niche, and have good UX reasons, but I'd bet the vast majority of use is outside of the web interface anyways (ie. on mobile).

With firefox and NoScript, you can whitelist the specific JS you need to make those sites work. You do it one time for a site you know you'll come back to often, and then you're done. In my case for example I whitelisted the scripts at old.reddit.com and redditstatic.com, and leave everything else blocked by default and it works fine for my needs (reading comments).

The fact that there are a handful of very frequently used websites that use JS doesn't make it impossible or overly burdensome to take sensible steps to limit which scripts you allow.

I use amazon in firefox with NoScript without issue, and while amazon gets to run some scripts, none of the JS at amazon-adsystem.com ever runs in my browser.

Youtube wants to load JS from over a dozen different places, but you only need to allow a couple to get videos to play (I personally prefer to just download yt videos to disk and watch them in VLC avoiding that issue entirely)

If you just want to read comments, libreddit & teddit are fantastic. Libreddit has some onion instances too.

you're not using the web like 90% of other users though (which is facebook, tiktok, twitter, big news sites, instagram, etc)

And those other 90% of users aren't using Tor.

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