Too much JavaScript

    "The amount of users with javascript disabled in their 
    browsers is around 1% or even less. Who are those people? 
    I always imagined them like some old-school security-
    obsessed maniacs." 

I'm one of those people and I write lots of JavaScript for a living at a company that writes mostly JavaScript. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of sites don't use JavaScript for anything useful. In fact a lot is actively not in your interests. 90% of the time most of the JS I encounter in SafeScript is metrics collection and adware. I also block javascript because I like to have a lot of tabs open and 100 tabs running javascript can easily send my fans into overdrive and kill my battery life. For the most part, I usually just whitelist domains I trust.

One day I wouldn't mind sitting down to write a browser plugin that is a lot smarter about executing JavaScript. I'm doing a lot with AST parsing with esprima these days so hopefully that experience will provide some insights over time. The truth is that the browser is supposed to be a user-agent and most need a lot more work still to act in the best interests of the users using them.

I especially would really love to build a LittleSnitch for browsers that overrides the browser's XHR, WebSockets and other networking features to disable timeouts and give you the option of whitelisting GETs, PUTS and POSTS to certain routes.

Furthermore, I think it would also be nice to be able to figure out what parts of a page touched certain elements and decide to block the javascript that manipulated that part of the page.

If it can be done without Javascript, it's probably better to do without it. Not only for compatibility, but it will be faster, too. Serving an empty div with a lot of Javascript to AJAX/JSON things in doesn't make everything better.

The real question is, why do people still disable Javascript? (And, why do browsers offer this option)

1) You were wondering why people disable JS.

2) You were making "THIS FACE" at one of them.

3) You didn't ask him why did he disable JS.

4) You're about to remake your site based on conclusions drawn by a sample of one.

Well, god damn it dude. That's not how thinking works!