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15% of browsers? I don't believe it. This has definitely not been my experience. You must be counting scrapers/bots in this total.

Security? The browser sandboxes everything.

Some people have valuable data inside their browsers. Javascript code can access this data.

Also, browsers aren't bug-free, and enabling Javascript significantly increases the attack surface.

Like what kind of data?

Seriously?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_banking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

Except that Javascript cannot access that, unless some glaring design flaws have been made.

If you disagree with me, and believe it can, I would just love to see a webpage that dumps out valuable data inside my browser. I'll visit it without any browser plugins using the same session I have been using for over a month, promise!

A human would never make "glaring design flaws".

> around 15% of the browsers we see have JS disabled

How many are bots/scrapers?

How are you detecting whether they have JS disabled?