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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser? In any case, I don't think many people would agree that the dubious extra privacy you gain from blocking that is really worth breaking half the web. Fingerprinting is not too hard even without JS.

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> Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser?

Lets see what he says on the subject.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

Ok so his issue is even more obtuse - he doesn't care about fingerprinting; he cares that not all JS code is GPL.

Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL even once.

And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool he created to attempt to address the problem[1]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on your computer without realising it.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IshKebab

> Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on your computer without realising it.

No, Free is not the same as GPL you ignoramus.

I would re-frame "is it really worth breaking half the web" as those sites are not compliant to begin with. Nothing in the web standards stack mandates javascript, its an optional feature! Web developers of yore understood that a fundamental property of a properly written web site was to degrade gracefully if javascript wasn't available, but the groupthink of the past decade has chosen weaponized incompetence over doing their jobs and in the process has not only thrown a load of noncompliant insecure garbage out there, but broken a load of accessibility standards, and other things in the process.

His stance is pretty simple. The JS on most pages is proprietary, and he doesn't like proprietary software.

Blocking most JavaScript is fine, it mostly just breaks the silly pointless over-designed sites anyway. Just like everything else, most of the internet is garbage; blocking over-designed JavaScript sites isn’t a perfect filter but it is an ok first heuristic.

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