Hacker News Reader

Comment by CyberDroiD | Hacker News Reader

Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. It's optional. That's why "Reader" mode is so handy, just show me the article so I can read it. Sometimes I don't like waiting for my browser to struggle with poorly written JS.

It sounds like a classic noobie mistake... "Why are users able to turn off Javascript?" "No idea." "Remove the feature!"

If anyone says Javascript is not optional, they are trying to sell you something: probably web apps!

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> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web.

Unfortunately, it very much is. Nearly every website on the internet is completely useless without JavaScript.

I visited a large number of links from the HN front page, and many of them had broken navigation or images. You can't actually vote on HN itself either.

Hacker News sans voting is nowhere near completely useless. I strongly suspect that a majority of people who read HN don't even have accounts (and thus are unable to vote). And even if the posts do contain broken links/images, a fair amount of text is often still available; I think a site's textual content is often its most important feature (unless it's a site specifically geared toward images/interactive content).

The "1% Rule"[0] grew out of this idea -- the hypothesis it poses is that 89% of the users of a given internet forum are strictly lurkers. HN has a more tech-oriented population than many forums, so I bet the differences between groups are less extreme, but I also bet that the overall trend still stands.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Right, but the change isn't targeting you, the hacker news reader. There's dozens of mom & pops out there who have no understanding how browsers work and when they disable javascript, they'll complain that firefox can't render pages as well as IE.

Which is two things to me: 1. not a tragedy that can never be fixed, but usually a minor inconvenience 2. one of those random opportunities to learn something, like in this case what Javascript is.

Taking away options from users because they don't know well enough can be kind of a self-full-filling prophecy, too. You cater to newbies, you get more and better newbies, entitled ones.

Stuff should be nice to use, of course, and shouldn't have friendly green buttons that makes it shoot knives at you etc. but it also shouldn't be less complex than it needs to be. If you have nothing left to take away you have perfection; if you still keep taking away stuff, you don't have even more perfection, you're just breaking things.

I never heard anyone complain that this option is there, or that it caused any trouble.. so what is this based on? Where are the petitions to remove this option that causes so much grief?

And why stop there? Imagine all the bad stuff you can do with the printer settings. Why are there options that allow people to waste ink, paper, or even maybe damage their printer? How many people threw away their printer, damaging the environment, because they thought it was broken... when all that happened was their cat walking over the keyboard and misconfiguring it? There might be actual kids choking on toxic fumes from those printers right now, nevermind the environment; and we worry about a website not working.

The Firefox options dialog is still kind of messy, and would be even if half of the options were removed. Take some leads from Opera :) Just taking away things doesn't automatically help, logically ordering them while also putting them in tiers of expertise does.

[By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts? They have to go, "hacker news readers" can get them back by editing an .ini setting -- the risk is just too great that someone might open the dev tools and then complain about weird rectangles on their screen, or to fail to convert because the website isn't as pretty as it could be]

You're a hacker, of course you've never heard anyone complain about the option. Mozilla may choose to differ as they probably have data that shows that a significant number of support emails show that disabling javascript was the root core of the problem. Besides, anyone who runs javascript disabled in a modern browser are either developers, or tin-foil hat wearers. I'm sure the ability to disable javascript was just an old remnant of 2002-era browsers when javascript was far less common. I think it's nearly impossible to find a webpage without a single reference to a javascript file these days.

You're a hacker, of course you've never heard anyone complain about the option.

Well, when people hear I'm good with computers they usually tell me all sorts of random computer troubles, but this one never popped up.

they probably have data that shows that a significant number of support emails show that disabling javascript was the root core of the problem

Are you sure? They seem to have data that most people don't use the option, and that seems to be all.

Besides, anyone who runs javascript disabled in a modern browser are either developers, or tin-foil hat wearers.

Or people who don't like staring at a white screen for several seconds because some ad scripts absolutely has to be loaded first, when they can have the exact same content, instantly, when browsing without Javascript. DSL still exists, you know. And it helps with noticing weight and skill differences where cable users might see none.

I also didn't get the memo that not providing a non-js fallback for normal day to day web stuff is not kind of noobish. Though I could point you to a host of articles pointing out the opposite, and they are fresher than 2002, too, and not from that usability guy with the ugly website either :P

I think it's nearly impossible to find a webpage without a single reference to a javascript file these days.

You will find a million that work without it, and even more that could work without it if they weren't made by [insert random expletive here].

Wikipedia? Works just fine. Search? Works fine. Facebook? I don't use it anymore, but I remember when it worked fine without JS as well, minus chat and instant notifications (oh god, the horror of only hearing about a new message on a page refresh ^^). Twitter? Breaking Twitter sounds like a good plan, not like a problem. But I digress.

You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others. (And yes, your parenthetical case at the end? It happened to me in just the last two weeks; coincidence, yes, but it did.)

You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others

Sadly, my mom doesn't go clicking around in the options dialog, no matter how much I encourage her ^^ Hardly in my presence, not ever in my absence.

But even if it was otherwise; explaining that "this needs to stay on or many websites won't properly function" while pointing out the options she might want to change, would be enough? I mean, you don't even have to understand Javascript to code in it, much less to be aware of the toggle... ?

We have roads with cars on them. People can walk into those roads, but don't. For many reasons, but none of them a deep understanding of biology or physics. If we fenced in all roads, we would avoid some of such accidents that are still happening - but would also raise people who need the fence from then on, because they're used to "wherever I can walk, there is no danger of being run over".

And yes, this also means looking someone who lost their child who ran into the road in the eye, and saying "I'm sorry for that, but it's still worth it to not fence everything in." Are we too squeamish for that? Since when are coders so scared of user complaints based on ignorance or using the software wrong? Don't those come with the terroritory?

> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web.

Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.

I surf a lot of the web with javascript off.

Most of the time, the major content of a page doesn't require it. When it does, it is usually either poor design, or good design where the design is intended to display a bunch of crap I don't want and download a hoard of tracking data.

To put it another way, when I'm surfing, Google Analytics isn't doing anything in my interest.

Which is why NoScript is great: you can load the main site functionality without having to enable Analytics. The global enable/disable JS switch is just terrible for this kind of browsing, in my opinion.

I have a crazy idea: a popup with an explanation the first time the user toggles the feature.

That's a terrible idea. The explanation would have to be very long - practically an essay. And the only people that will understand the explanation (or even care) are folks who are competent enough to quickly google how to disable javascript through about:config.

Increased software complexity and no tangible benefit. Lose-Lose.

What? If you can't explain in one sentence the fact that disabling JS will break most websites and it should only be done if you know what you're doing, then you've got bigger problems.

And the 'people that know what they are doing' are the ones that know what about:config is, and how to Google for extensions to disable JavaScript. It's also arguable that an extension that provides an easy 'toggle JavaScript on/off' button is a much better interface than needing to dive into the preferences pane to disable JavaScript (and possibly re-enable it sometimes).

People will still do it without understanding and then complain that Firefox broke. There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox. Especially when if you actually want to disable Javascript it's still very easy.

People will still do it without understanding and then complain that Firefox broke.

If that is true, then point me to all those complaints.

There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox.

That's called kicking away the ladder, and fuck that with a rusty chainsaw. How are people supposed to even get curious about what Javascript is, when they never hear of it?

Somehow the dark corner of a preferences pane doesn't seem like the place anyone would choose for an introduction to Javascript.

That's the point, you don't choose when to first come across something you haven't heard of before. You don't wake up one morning and say "I guess I'll go to the library and get a book about Javascript" because you dreamed about it.

There are a million ways to display and to drill down into options that would make the FF options less cluttered, more logical, while having even more options than it does. There are ways to inform users pretty much exhaustively via built-in tooltips and documentation -- all of this has been working great in the 90s and got better since then. Icon > Title/Tooltip > Short Description > Verbose Description, so you learn everything you "stumble over" once when you need it, and from then on just use it, with the option to refresh your knowledge anytime.

Just compare about:config in Opera and Firefox, and simply accept we're dealing with different levels of skill and taste here, not just different choices.

Spend 30 seconds googling to find reams of UX research that says most users don't read. Actually, I'll do it for you.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-we... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...

It depends on the type of article. I write a lot of blog posts about math. The most convenient way to do this is using Mathjax. If browsers had native support for mathematical notation then I would be inclined to agree with you, but this is not currently the case.

Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.

I don't know how extensive Unicode math symbols are, but it's unclear to me how you would display things like matrices and do alignment of multiline equations.

I'm not sure either. But I know that you can do crazy things with unicode, and I'd bet that if you treated treated unicode as a sort of low-level compile-to target you could then design a high-level language from which to write math text. I'm not sure of the practical benefit and maybe this would be even more inaccessible to people... but still, I think JS is great, but wouldn't pure HTML and encodings be even cooler?

Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏

And load fonts with JS?

Isn't that what MathML is meant to do? Browser support is incomplete, but it sounds like a perfect use case for a javascript polyfill, so you could make pages that would work with either native browser support or javascript.

I came here to wax rhapsodic about Reader mode too. It's my favorite web browser feature in half a decade.

The fact is that most web sites use JavaScript _and_ CSS in a user-hostile manner. CSS is used to draw the eye towards advertising or other content on the site, with the hope of distracting me from what I came to read. Many sites even use CSS to create a faux-popup overlay "window" that has to be dismissed before the content can be viewed.

And of course, the vast majority of JavaScript is aimed at analytics, tracking cookies, advertisements, and other code that, as a user, I'd really rather not execute.

My ideal solution is something like ClickToPlugin, where a site can request JavaScript, and I can choose to grant it or not. Mozilla's decision is disappointing, because they are working in the interest of web publishers instead of web users.

Ghostery is great at getting rid of most of that stuff and Adblock removes the rest; one can also disable Adblock per domain.

Click to play on plugins is great, Firefox should also have it builtin (as Chrome does).

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