Ask HN: Browsing the web with JavaScript turned off?

For non work stuff I normally use my phone to browse, and I mostly browse HN and a couple of local news sites.

On chrome mobile, I have JS disabled by default with a few exceptions (HN is one of them). If I need JS I use Firefox.

I prefer not getting content than getting a bunch of ads and annoying popups.

I do (with the NoScript browser extension: https://noscript.net/). The main reason is to reduce my attack surface. A secondary benefit is it eliminates most ads and other annoying distractions.

Yes, I mostly do. Simply, for a random website the drawbacks of giving Javascript access to it outweigh the benefits for me. (Small probabilities of a website fingerprinting me, infringing my privacy or executing a browser exploit add up, and there also is a small philosophical component to this of preference of minimalism.) When I trust the site or it is just too more useful for me with Javascript than without, though, I enable Javascript for it specifically.

I look forward to browsers which defend against violation of user privacy more intelligently than just rejecting all Javascript, for example, marking some information secret so that everything computed from it can be displayed and saved, but not sent back to the net - if an attempt is made, it is stopped and either error is shown or error is returned, but other threads of code are not affected. For example, for an editor web app, the file that is loaded into the app is marked secret so it can be edited and saved locally, but cannot leave the browser outwards; or for a page that contacts multiple servers, info from each will be marked as secret for it, so every server can get back its own info but cannot get info of other ones (can also configure which site can additionally get info from which). Can use typing here to guarantee correctness.

Not entirely, but pretty close to it. I use this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...

I probably have JS off on more than 70% of the sites I browse. That's because JS is so widely abused: popups, autoplaying videos, sites demanding my location, etc. turning it off is the only way to make sites usable again.

A few people who use screen readers will disable JS because even if a site makes its dynamic content accessible it can still be annoying to deal with as a screen reader user.

People who are very security / privacy conscious often disable JS too.

It's a losing battle though unfortunately. A lot of sites require JS these days and even the accessibility standards no longer hold the position that a site should cater for users who might disable JS for accessibility reasons.