Say “Yes” to JavaScript

"Some applications now are written as frontends to APIs and the application does not provide any rendering on the server side besides a nice error message that the website requires JavaScript"

1. Fix it

2. Stop using those APIs if they will not fix it (otherwise things will not be fixed)

"Many modern web applications can be much more performant because they take advantage of JavaScript"

That's nice, but I do not want you offloading your computation onto my computer. I may allow something like Folding@Home, but why should I allow something like rendering advertising?

"User interfaces that depend on JavaScript have much better abilities to make it enjoyable for a user"

User interfaces that work with or without Javascript and only use Javascript as an enhancement give you the best of all worlds. It is not impossible, you are just being lazy and trying to shut out people who disagree with you.

"A good example for instance is payment handling on the internet."

This is kind of like saying, "Every car should have OnStar; a good example is refueling!"

"You don't get extra privacy by disabling JavaScript"

Javascript on its own is sufficient to carry out numerous privacy violations, and presents various security problems. Yes, there are other things you can do, but if I stopped you from using everything else you could still use Javascript to accomplish your aims. Javascript also presents problems for Tor users, who might be de-anonymized (accidentally or deliberately) if they allow Javascript to run.

"At the same time I can enhance your browser experience"

Please do not do this; I do not want you "enhancing" my browsing "experience." All I want is to get the information I asked for, maybe post some comments, and manage my finances. I do not need any of these websites to have fancy UI effects, and while client side validation may be convenient for me it is not something I will miss terribly. My browser already knows what tabs are, how to load images, and how to submit forms. What are you adding that is worth the added risk of Javascript?

"We as developers should be happy that browsers go our way and make our life easier."

Sorry but my browser is supposed to work for me and not for you. If this is your argument for Javascript -- it makes your job easier -- then I see no reason not to keep it disabled by default. If life without Javascript is so terribly hard, the problem is with your techniques, frameworks, and designs -- fix those and leave my browser alone.

I wish people would make good HTML/Web Apps instead of trying to (badly) imitate desktop apps. To me, that means being lean and embracing the transactional style (see 3270).

I see very few convincing reasons to start running code in order to display a text article or video, apart from better ad tracking.

Typical worrisome cases are when a malicious script scrapes credential forms or the tracking of mouse cursor movements / page scrolling for advertising analytics.

Essentially, I'll tolerate the web server having logs of my access to the page, but what I do once I've rendered the page should be my own business.

If I want Javascript off on a webpage, I think I should be able to do that. Preferably with a keyboard shortcut or an easily accessible menu option (like Opera), because I agree with one thing (that the OP implied):

I can't be browsing the web, with Javascript disabled, and expect that everything works.

And recently I've been trying to come to terms with the fact that if I'm browsing without Javascript, a lot of things will stop working with no explanation or even an error message. It would be nice, but it's clear one cannot reasonably expect that.

I want to be able to disable JS just because. Yes most websites are well-behaved and use standard libraries and there is not much reason to disable JS, nothing you can't fix in a better way (I also agree often other ways would be "better").

But there are also non-well-behaved websites out there. So I want to be able to selectively enable and disable all types of content: images, CSS, JS, plugins, sound, video, you name it. Preferably all these settings would be saved per site (like Opera).

But what if I'm not interested in 'web applications' and I just want to read web sites? Apparently Firefox isn't designed with that task in mind anymore.

Now is there a way to disable modal/lightboxes with advertising offers or links to social media networks? I find that incredibly annoying.

Oh well. At least I'll always have Emacs.

It's amazing just how bad Web Developers are.

There are? I've never heard of that happening. The author should provide some kind of empirical evidence on the prevalence of that problem.

>It's a great day for a web developer when we can finally assume that a browser will have JavaScript running.

You can assume that without removing the option to disable JavaScript. In addition, technical users (the only one's who are disabling JavaScript) can still disable JavaScript using add-ons or using other browsers.

> It's a great day for a web developer when we can finally assume that a browser will have JavaScript running.

That's a very good point. Even blind people no longer run their browsers with JS disabled [1]. As long as the content and navigation make semantic sense, I don't think there's any reason for a web designer or developer to refrain from adding frills with JS nowadays, any more than there is reason to refrain from using CSS. Both are integral parts of the package of specifications we call HTML5.

If a user even bothers to disable JS, he's intentionally asking you for a different experience, so give him a different experience! As long as the text is readable and the navigation links point to the right URLs, there's no need to try to make the <noscript> experience identical to the normal experience. No sane developer tries to make the no-CSS experience (e.g. lynx) identical to the normal experience, right?

My only complaint is with certain websites that make absolutely gratuitous use of JS, like using AJAX to load the text content of the page. That belongs to the same category as using tables for the entire layout. You don't go about disabling <table> tags just because people abuse it in annoying ways.

[1] http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-screen-readers-dont-use-ja...

I normally get along with Armin, but I feel that he left out a key thing here: Some people disable JS because they feel that JS obfuscates and degrades the Web-browsing experience. Sadly, we are no longer catering to these people: viewing a website without JS enabled should not render the fundamental content of the website unavailable, and we have forsaken that ideal in favor of fancy bells and whistles on our pages.

There's a fourth reason, as well: JS should not be required on grounds of security, not just privacy. Sites should not have to run what is essentially unsafe, privileged, arbitrary code in order to do their daily business. A company might claim that their JS is harmless because it only animates a title bar or powers a dropdown menu, but proving that requires a manual audit of all JS on the page, which amounts to thousands of lines of JS on a modern site. (Have you read through the copy of jQuery being served to you? Probably not.) Common repositories of JS ameliorate the problem somewhat, but it can't be eliminated.

This is not okay, by the way. Requiring JS to read a news article, or upload an image, or view a forum thread, is insane and we should not tolerate it.