What exactly is it with javascript that these people don't like? Does it offend them that the web becomes a more dynamic and colorful experience? I don't get it.
In general, it is a mighty odd notion every random person who can throw up a web page gets to run code on my machine. This shouldn't be a casual thing, sandbox or not.
And to achieve these cool animations websites have to load a shitton of javascript which makes them even slower.
These often even look sluggish, but maybe it is a relative thing and some see the prompt movement of UI elements as unpleasant and call the animations "smooth". Or maybe it really takes a very powerful GPU on the right hardware to fully experience animations without feeling annoyed? Or both?
It offends me that in order to read a document I also have to grant the author of that document execution privileges on my machine.
It offends me when a page’s images are all blurry, low-resolution images (which would be redownloaded by the Javascript I have disabled).
The World Wide Web is a web of documents. It offends me that is has instead become a consortium of walled gardens.
Sure, and if you want to define it as such you are free to only include documents in that definition. The rest of us will keep using the same protocols for accessing other things too and have another definition of www.
Here in 2024, I am running Linux, with a nice huge full-colour display running XOrg (because Wayland is still not ready for primetime). I’m using Firefox. I have Emacs. TCP/IP and Ethernet are still around, although if I want spotty performance there’s always WiFi. FLAC and Ogg Vorbis have mostly replaced MP3s. I can easily watch high-resolution video, which is a definite improvement. Streaming, too, has gotten a lot better. I have a CD/DVD RW drive in my computer. CPU, RAM and storage are a lot larger, faster and cheaper.
It’s not really that different, other than the spyware infesting the web. That pretty much didn’t exist in 1999.
I wouldn’t mind going back to 1999. The software I used had a lot less bloat!
In general, minimizing the amount of JS you write improves all of these issues across the board. A minimum of JS is easy to debug and ridiculously fast.
Hijacking the user's scroll, rendering the entire website content on JS at client-side (although the emergence of SSR has made this less of an issue. Who knew that not rendering all the things on the client device makes things better, I'm shocked…) and SPAs more generally (GitHub for example is so jank and annoyingly slow nowadays, it's just irritating), doing things like buttons and links with a `<div>` with an `onClick` instead of using the appropriate markup, et cetera.
Of course, many of these things are exactly opposite to the actual best web development practices. But why, then, is this shite so prevalent‽ It's also bad for things like accessibility, with screen-reader users and such sometimes struggling majorly because of myriads of badly developed web applications. Meanwhile a standard HTML document, with some CSS and maybe some JS for progressive enhancement just works. Of course, I know that many use cases require far more interactivity and dynamism than that, but is it such a big burden to not make the user experience worse with bollocks like reinventing browser scrolling?
That's a shame, I used that a lot for quick browsing, checking and/or comparison of code in repositories hosted by Github.
It's gotten so much better to write, and most websites manage not to screw things up. But it only takes a few of them to put a bad taste in your mouth.
But don't worry, if there were any alternatives, people would screw them up, too. When WASM really takes off, it's going to be quite fun to watch. Everyone that hates JS will hate WASM even more.
The 'build' tooling is terrible too, with layers of build-steps (due to incompatible code module types) that result in excessive script sizes. Due to the nature of Javascript, each byte is more computationally expensive than HTML or CSS.
TLDR: Websites are slower, and the fanciness doesn't add much.
I don't dislike JavaScript. I dislike JavaScript being used to make the web suck. So I have NoScript for when it sucks too much.