Show HN: A No-JavaScript iOS Browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A No-JavaScript iOS Browser

praxis.a6s.nz

Congrats on shipping. It's great to see more alternatives in this space, I built https://noscript.it a few years ago to allow me to selectively disable javascript in Safari. But I rarely use it, or any of the other alternatives (like Stopthescript and Brave) that is available because so much of the Web is just broken beyond repair without javascript and there is no incentive to try to reverse this trend.

I mean, most noscript users are invisible to analytics, so even if there was a lot of us, which there isn't, nobody would know :-)

And also the worst pages which abuse javascript the most, and where users would benefit the most from noscript have negative incentive to allow that as it a lot of the bad JS is ads.

Sorry for turning this into a rant about general things instead of your app. I have a lot of feelings about this :-)

One idea for your app though, what do you think about a shared broken-blocklist? It's something I considered a few times, as displaying a white page isn't great UX. And without great UX the critical mass of people without JS enabled will be hard to reach. So my idea was to have a blocklist shared between either all users of an app or all noscript solutions. I think the UX would improve if we could just show a informative error message instead of a blank or mostly broken page, and crowd sourcing a list of pages which won't work without JS might be the way to go?

Thanks. Yeah, telling apart websites from web apps is a pain. It may be clear to a web engineer which URLs might work and which URLs almost certainly won't, but to a normal user that's far from obvious.

A blocklist sounds like a great idea. It would definitely help corner that case.

In NoScript.it, are you using an existing open source list or building one out?

Yeah and then add to that the websites which are not apps but still break :-(

As for noscript.it, I'm not aware of any existing lists, I have a short hard coded list so far. If you start a list I'd happily use and contribute to it :-) On noscript.it I have an additional problem in that not all sites allow embedding into a iframe and some block the cloudflare proxy I use to get around that. I maintain another list for those pages, but it probably breaks for a lot of other pages also without any useful error message to the user.

Very nice! I'm starting to believe the no-JS life may end up being the only answer to the enshittification of the mobile web. One of the reasons I built my own iOS browser was to have a "disable JS" button readily available, so I fully support you!

Is Praxis FOSS?

It is free, it is not open source. Why?

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