They're by definition incompetently designed, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously this excludes anything which couldn't possibly work without JavaScript, like "P

They're by definition incompetently designed, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously this excludes anything which couldn't possibly work without JavaScript, like "Photoshop in your browser" or something. For pages of information, there's no excuse. I use the Firefox noscript extension by default. If I find some page which doesn't work without JavaScript, more often than not I'll leave it. Sometimes going a step further and actually disabling CSS makes it usable. The most common irritants nowadays are "single-page web-page viewing web applications", which I want nothing to do with (if you think you can reimplement a web browser's navigation logic as robustly as a web browser does, you're probably wrong; every now and then I have to hard-refresh one of these sites because their navigation process breaks and the "single-page web-page viewing web application" has effectively crashed.) A particularly bizarre example of a pointless and needlessly JS-requiring single-page web-page viewing web application is certain blogspot.com themes which have become prevalent, so even Google has sunk to this sort of silliness. Bizarrely, these pages are viewable without JavaScript via Google's cache; I have to wonder if Google's cached pages are now some sort of DOM dump (since Googlebot now runs JavaScript), meaning that Google is fixing Google's broken web development practices. Another irritant is demand-load images. All this means is the page has no images when I view it. It's an inherently broken practice. Unbelievably, Google's dubious "AMP" project seems to be trying to make people use custom HTML tags to incorporate images, then load them using some AMP-standard approved JavaScript script incorporated in the page. This design is garbage from the very beginning for all of the same reasons. Progressive optimization is the only sane design. And this isn't just about browsers without JavaScript. Unreliable network connectivity can cause scripts to fail to load, or be delayed. Why make basic functionality of the page reliant on waiting for those scripts to load?