It depends what you do on the web. To use web applications, obviously you need JavaScript. To read text, you generally don't. Also, even when you do need JavaSc

It depends what you do on the web. To use web applications, obviously you need JavaScript. To read text, you generally don't. Also, even when you do need JavaScript, you generally need it from the original host and maybe one other (e.g., googleapis.com); you don't need it from the analytics and advertising hosts, for example. Buying things with security add-ons installed sometimes can be tricky: When you click 'buy', the host site sometimes contacts destinations that were previously unknown to your browser (payment processors, etc.), meaning you wouldn't know to enable them. You may hesitate to reconfigure NoScript/uMatrix and reload because you don't know if you are making multiple payments or placing multiple orders. On the positive side, uMatrix and NoScript can remember what you enabled to get that page working, so you configure them the first time you visit the site and then forget it. NoScript's configurations are less granular, however, which may discourage permanently allowing some things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624628 (But NoScript has many more security features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624596 )