I block JS, too. And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website. It makes web browsing more insecure and less private, makes page load times slower, and wastes energy.
To put that in context, about 6 percent of US homes have no internet access at all. The “I turn off JS” crowd is at least 3x smaller than the crowd with no access at all.
The JS ship sailed years ago. You can turn it off but a bunch of things simply will not work and no amount of insisting that it would not be required will change that.
To quote someone who lived before me: don't accept the things you cannot change. Change the things you cannot accept.
And the no-JS ship has not sailed. Government websites require accessibility, and at least in the UK, do not rely on JS.
I’m not saying change is not possible. I’m saying the change you propose is misguided. I do not believe the entire world should abandon JS to accommodate your unusual preferences nor should everyone be obliged to build two versions of their site, one for the masses and one for those with JS turned off.
Yes, JS is overused. But JS also brings significant real value to the web. JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Exactly. JS should be used to make apps. A blog is not an app. Your average blog should have 0 lines of JS. Every time I see a blog or a news article who's content doesn't load because I have JS disabled I strongly reconsider whether it's worth my time to read or not.
> JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Horribly at that, with poorer accessibility features, worse latency, abused visual style that doesn't match the host operating system, unusable during times of net outages, etc, etc.
I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
> This was its original intent.
Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
> Horribly at that
I disagree. You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in. I can load up a random web app and have high confidence that it can’t muck with my computer. I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
is "every website now expects to run arbitrary code on the client's computer" really a more secure state of affairs? after high profile hardware vulnerabilities exploitable even from within sandboxed js?
from how many unique distributors did the average person run random untrusted apps that required sandboxing before and after this became the normal way to deliver a purely informational website and also basically everything started happening online?
I used to help friends and family disinfect their PCs from all the malware they’d unintentionally installed.
I use KDE Marble (OpenStreetMap) and Invidious. They work fine.
> Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
And that's why webshit is webshit.
> I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
I can, and besides the point, why should anyone run random desktop apps? (Rhetorical question, they shouldn't.) I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
So no. Some major websites don’t actually work for you.
> And that's why webshit is webshit.
I don’t understand this statement. Webshit is webshit because the platform grew beyond basic html docs? At some point this just feels like hating on change. The web grew beyond static html just like Unix grew beyond terminals.
> I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
If this is the archetype of the person who turns off JS then I would bet the real percentage is way less than 1%.
It’s fine for you to turn off JS. It’s also fine for developers to require JS. Software has had minimum system requirements forever. I can’t run Android apps on my Palm Pilot from 2002 either and no one is obligated to make them work for me.
And frankly, from an economic POV, I can't blame them. Imagine a company who write a React-based website. (And again, I'm not weighing in on the goodness or badness of that.) Depending on how they implemented it, supporting a non-JS version may literally require a second, parallel version of the site. And for what, to cater to 1-2% of users? "Hey boss, can we triple our budget to serve two versions of the site, kept in lockstep and feature identical so that visitors don't scream at us, to pick up an extra 1% or 2% of users, who by definition are very finicky?" Yeah, that's not happening.
I've launched dozens of websites over the years, all of them using SSR (or HTML templates as we called them back in the day). I've personally never written a JavaScript-native website. I'm not saying the above because I built a career on writing JS or something. And despite that, I completely understand why devs might refuse to support non-JS browsers. It's a lot of extra work, it means they can't use the "modern" (React launched in 2013) tools they're use to, and all without any compelling financial benefit.
Pity.
You ostensibly run some flavor of Linux. Do you also complain that macOS apps don't run on your machine? It seems to me like a similar argument: somebody has developed an application in some particular way, but your choices have resulted in that application not running on your machine. Your choices are not necessarily _wrong_, but they are of very little consequence to somebody who has developed an application with a particular environment/runtime in mind. Why should they have to make significant architectural changes to their application to support your non-standard choices?
Here is why this is abusive: You can always restrict the subset of the web platform you demand to a subset that is arbitrarily difficult or even impossible to support. No matter how much accommodation is granted, it will be all for naught, because some guy out there goes even further with blocking things and starts blocking CSS. Next thing you know there's a guy who blocks HTML and you're expected to render out your website as a SVG with clickable links.