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Comment by ruuda | Hacker News Reader

> Type confusion in V8

Fortunately I disabled js by default. Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web. Including nvd.nist.gov, which shows a completely blank page without js enabled, even though with js it’s just a simple page with only static content.

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> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web.

More like 99%

I use Firefox with Noscript and I'm _totally aware_ that almost no website works without allowing it JS.

Even using Noscript it's becoming more and more exhausting every year, it's plain impossible to browse the internet without JS at all.

The problem is that a lot of frontend web dev is driven by the React ecosystem which requires you to have SSR figured out for "no js on the client" to even partially work, which, if you ever tried to go all the way (e.g. RR v7 w/ full SSR) in a not-a-toy project, is not easy to set up and think about by any means, because your server has to be a js one at which point your entire server-side solution consist of node or node-like js server, postgres or mysql (with pooled connections through something like mysql2 and probably drizzle), something for caching like Redis, some complex process manager like pm2... i say complex because if you want to have a high performance fault tolerant gracefully restarting automatic new code deploying system ... and all of that with caching layer(s), Redis sending cache updates without you polling etc., you have to implement and test these yourself... Everything async and thinking in long term running processes and thinking about the async loop instead of a "php-like" model. Components being a potential source of memory leaks, thinking about components having to work on client and server environments, keeping SSR performance (in the sense of component rendering complexity) up etc.

This is not something just anyone is going to rush into. Bigger teams or js/ts evangelists will eventually arrive at that point if they're running something where no-js (really a side effect of seo goals) is important, but "normal people" will spend this time and engineering effort elsewhere.

I think the industry in general is moving past React, as now, and definitely in near future, the only thing that matters is ideas, the rest is for the LLMs to figure out, and so the "frameworks" are going to completely disappear from people's minds as "programming" essentially becomes "telling the AI what to do" and the AI writes asm or even binary. That is when, no JS, may become more viable again lol.

People, including me, resist it, but in the future "programming" is not going to be about writing code (or even checking it, we're way too slow and error-prone to do that), but about coming up with ideas of how to capture real world problems in an IT system, and how to solve those problems by existing (or novel) ways, picking the right tools for the job (say a statistician picking the fitting metric to capture some property of the system that will actually project meaningful observability improvements and not be "just a bunch of noise") and making the right architectural decisions in terms of correctness, performance, scope, taking into account deadlines and budget. And being the domain model glue. Everything else, all the nitty gritty we used to call programming, all the <insert a quadrillion of CS jargon keywords>, is going to be done by AI ... it's a mag 9.5 quake tsunami and it can't be stopped now.

This might completely wipe out things like React (which are largely made for humans writing the code, not for humans consuming the output of that code) faster than anyone thought possible.

This is a gross exaggeration. More than not, random websites still work without JS for basic content but a few big ones don't.

> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web

Only 30%? In 2026? With CloudFlare and Anubis et al absolutely everywhere? Not to mention SPAs

Right, Anubis is a fair point, that has for sure been rising in recent months. Often when I get an Anubis page, I am reminded that I was doomscrolling and that I did not want to see the page that badly anyway, and I close the tab.

CloudFlare is a fair point though it depends on the threat level set by the website and how much CF doesn't like your browser fingerprint. In many cases it will just let you through without scripts.

Anubis is trivially bypassed by an extension.

> Unfortunately, it breaks about 30% of the web.

Only 30?

People who disable JS are very likely to have delusions like this.

I think my subjective feeling is in that ballpark, yes. There are of course many sites that are more like web apps that require js, but those are relatively trusted, I added exceptions for them long ago. For sites that I visit for the first time, I think more than half still work to some extent. Maybe they are slightly broken, but at least I can read the page. I’d say around 20–30% of the web even gets _better_, because you don’t get ads or cookiewalls. But then there are also many sites that just remain a blank page, not even showing a message that js is required. (And as the sibling comment points out, recently Anubis is also becoming more common; maybe in recent months it’s closer to 40–50% unusable.) When I hit that, often I am reminded that I wasn’t that interested anyway, and I close the tab. So maybe it’s more than 30% that breaks, and a more accurate statement would be “of the sites where I ended up reading a page, I had to opt in to js about 30% of the time”.

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