10 ms·

Websockets? Really? Even if they are an ugly hack on top of HTTP, they are too damn useful to be disabled. Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it.

krapp 9y ago
>Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. ...as if much of HN's userbase doesn't already do that.
- outworlder 9y ago
  Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done. (Other than posting on HN itself, that is)
  - superkuh 9y ago
    Pretty easily. Just temp whitelist if it's really needed (ie, a bank or government website). Otherwise close the tab and avoid the waste of time that 'web app' sites represent.
  - Momquist 9y ago
    Surprisingly well, from my own experience. It can even increase your productivity and dicrease distractions: it blocks most ads, suppresses annoying "interactive" features, bans participation in most time-wasting sites (eg. facebook) while still allowing browsing. And of course security. For the very few domains I deem absolutely necessary, I can always whitelist them.
    - twhb 9y ago
      It sounds like the problem is you're spending your time on adversarial websites. Give JS to a skillful developer who shares your goals, and they'll use it to make the website better.
      - quickben 9y ago
        By the look of it that altruism died ten years ago. Current sites load 20-100 external scripts, mostly in ads, analytics, and non essential content.
        twhb 9y ago
        Not altruism (except occasionally), incentive alignment. Websites that don't otherwise profit from you are incentivized to be as you describe; websites that profit from your happiness (paid directly, funded for a purpose, a generosity, etc) aren't.
      - Momquist 9y ago
        Actually I don't. I never had any account on FB for example, but once in a blue moon I get to visit a public FB page (like a recent blog post posted on HN recently), and having JS disabled let me browse it without worries. How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? My personal tastes tend to go not too far off this kind of design: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ If this hypothetical developer is really sharing my goals then he'll use the <noscript> tag, and I'll be happy enough with HTML/CSS. For text-heavy sites, which are the ones I use the most, JS adds nothing I want: tracking? 3rd-party ads? lazy-loading? comments via disqus? sharing to social media? Thanks, but not for me.
        twhb 9y ago
        > How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? devdocs.io uses JS to make an essentially-static website much faster to load and navigate. HN lets you vote without reloading the page. Shopping carts. Webmail. Google Maps. Rich text editors. Navigating around Spotify while the music keeps playing. Feedback on forms without clearing or changing something. Keeping a table of contents in sync with what you're viewing. Keeping changing data correct, like feeds, whether a service is up, whether you're signed in. Chat. Video calls. And areas not yet widespread. AMP's speed (which would be inoffensive, I think, if intra-site). Layouts more advanced than CSS can express, like a newspaper's or the positioning of plaques at museums. Even smarter data compression for repetitive content. And areas we're just now getting the tech for, like 3D simulations and peer-to-peer networking.
  - ACow_Adonis 9y ago
    Well, 99% of the javascript/web is more about distraction, advertising and tracking than about getting anything done, and the other 1% is a small number of high-frequency sites that can be selectively white-listed. Plus my bandwidth is a fraction of others and browser responsiveness shoots up... I think you may have it arse-backwards when it comes to productivity... /numbers pulled out of said backwards-arse.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    > Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done. (Other than posting on HN itself, that is) It's very straightforward. I allow javascript on the sites that I trust to run javascript - in a protected environment. There are tons of ways to do this. I see how long other's computers take to render simple pages, and I just shake my head.
  - IgniteTheSun 9y ago
    With the exception of a couple of sites, I rarely turn on javascript. (There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.) About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap2it until last week, but have not yet found an alternative. Anyone have any suggestions?
    - jrcii 9y ago
      eBay, PayPal, and Amazon are useless without JavaScript, just off the top of my head.
      - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
        Perhaps, but like the grandparent post said, one can find other online stores that don't require JavaScript. Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them. If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS. I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.
  - quickben 9y ago
    I wonder how you all get anything done by not disabling it. No script. If the page breaks, whitelist the primary domain. For most non shady sites, this gives you a blazing fast site with near zero crap on it.
- yorby 9y ago
  I don't completely disable javascript but I use uMatrix... it seems like a good middle ground...
  - bhrgunatha 9y ago
    I used to use NoScript. It was a revelation to see how much junk just disappears when there's no javascript. Now I find uMatrix better but the first rule I created was: * * * block Since that was the basic starting point for NoScript. Then slowly build up your whitelist of sites to allow javascript as desired/needed.
swiley 9y ago
Does this add that to the preferences GUI again? That was one of the big features I was looking for.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
>Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. Yes, let's do that.
mulmen 9y ago
I disable javascript and I miss out on a lot of the internet. I don't miss any of it though.
IncRnd 9y ago
> Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. That happened a few years ago.
CodeWriter23 9y ago
Well, Meltdown proves the formerly-paranoid Javascript rejectors were actually insightful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 9y ago
  That they happened to be right? Yes. That they were insightful? Not so clear.
foo101 9y ago
What plugins or techniques do you use to disable JavaScript while keeping the flexibility to whitelist some of the websites where JavaScript can be enabled?
- rickycook 9y ago
  i love “is blocker” for safari; it’s hugely configurable with regexes, allowing things on some domains only, allowing globally from some domains, blocking of canvas elements, XHR requests, frames, plenty more too!
  - foo101 9y ago
    When you use a thing like "is blocker", do you still need a separate ad blocker or is the JavaScript blocker sufficient to block ads as well?
    - rickycook 9y ago
      sorry i didn’t see the reply... i meant “js blocker” and auto correct happened. i use ublock as well, because it picks up on regexes for things like piwik (you could have something like https://somesite.com/piwik.js https://somesite.com/piwik.js allowed because you just unblock somesite.com, or ga hosted locally etc)

krapp 9y ago

>Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. ...as if much of HN's userbase doesn't already do that.

outworlder 9y ago
Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done. (Other than posting on HN itself, that is)
- superkuh 9y ago
  Pretty easily. Just temp whitelist if it's really needed (ie, a bank or government website). Otherwise close the tab and avoid the waste of time that 'web app' sites represent.
- Momquist 9y ago
  Surprisingly well, from my own experience. It can even increase your productivity and dicrease distractions: it blocks most ads, suppresses annoying "interactive" features, bans participation in most time-wasting sites (eg. facebook) while still allowing browsing. And of course security. For the very few domains I deem absolutely necessary, I can always whitelist them.
  - twhb 9y ago
    It sounds like the problem is you're spending your time on adversarial websites. Give JS to a skillful developer who shares your goals, and they'll use it to make the website better.
    - quickben 9y ago
      By the look of it that altruism died ten years ago. Current sites load 20-100 external scripts, mostly in ads, analytics, and non essential content.
      - twhb 9y ago
        Not altruism (except occasionally), incentive alignment. Websites that don't otherwise profit from you are incentivized to be as you describe; websites that profit from your happiness (paid directly, funded for a purpose, a generosity, etc) aren't.
    - Momquist 9y ago
      Actually I don't. I never had any account on FB for example, but once in a blue moon I get to visit a public FB page (like a recent blog post posted on HN recently), and having JS disabled let me browse it without worries. How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? My personal tastes tend to go not too far off this kind of design: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ If this hypothetical developer is really sharing my goals then he'll use the <noscript> tag, and I'll be happy enough with HTML/CSS. For text-heavy sites, which are the ones I use the most, JS adds nothing I want: tracking? 3rd-party ads? lazy-loading? comments via disqus? sharing to social media? Thanks, but not for me.
      - twhb 9y ago
        > How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? devdocs.io uses JS to make an essentially-static website much faster to load and navigate. HN lets you vote without reloading the page. Shopping carts. Webmail. Google Maps. Rich text editors. Navigating around Spotify while the music keeps playing. Feedback on forms without clearing or changing something. Keeping a table of contents in sync with what you're viewing. Keeping changing data correct, like feeds, whether a service is up, whether you're signed in. Chat. Video calls. And areas not yet widespread. AMP's speed (which would be inoffensive, I think, if intra-site). Layouts more advanced than CSS can express, like a newspaper's or the positioning of plaques at museums. Even smarter data compression for repetitive content. And areas we're just now getting the tech for, like 3D simulations and peer-to-peer networking.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  Well, 99% of the javascript/web is more about distraction, advertising and tracking than about getting anything done, and the other 1% is a small number of high-frequency sites that can be selectively white-listed. Plus my bandwidth is a fraction of others and browser responsiveness shoots up... I think you may have it arse-backwards when it comes to productivity... /numbers pulled out of said backwards-arse.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done. (Other than posting on HN itself, that is) It's very straightforward. I allow javascript on the sites that I trust to run javascript - in a protected environment. There are tons of ways to do this. I see how long other's computers take to render simple pages, and I just shake my head.
- IgniteTheSun 9y ago
  With the exception of a couple of sites, I rarely turn on javascript. (There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.) About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap2it until last week, but have not yet found an alternative. Anyone have any suggestions?
  - jrcii 9y ago
    eBay, PayPal, and Amazon are useless without JavaScript, just off the top of my head.
    - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
      Perhaps, but like the grandparent post said, one can find other online stores that don't require JavaScript. Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them. If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS. I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.
- quickben 9y ago
  I wonder how you all get anything done by not disabling it. No script. If the page breaks, whitelist the primary domain. For most non shady sites, this gives you a blazing fast site with near zero crap on it.
yorby 9y ago
I don't completely disable javascript but I use uMatrix... it seems like a good middle ground...
- bhrgunatha 9y ago
  I used to use NoScript. It was a revelation to see how much junk just disappears when there's no javascript. Now I find uMatrix better but the first rule I created was: * * * block Since that was the basic starting point for NoScript. Then slowly build up your whitelist of sites to allow javascript as desired/needed.

swiley 9y ago

Does this add that to the preferences GUI again? That was one of the big features I was looking for.

amiga-workbench 9y ago

>Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. Yes, let's do that.

mulmen 9y ago

I disable javascript and I miss out on a lot of the internet. I don't miss any of it though.

IncRnd 9y ago

> Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it. That happened a few years ago.

CodeWriter23 9y ago

Well, Meltdown proves the formerly-paranoid Javascript rejectors were actually insightful.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
duskwuff 9y ago
That they happened to be right? Yes. That they were insightful? Not so clear.

foo101 9y ago

What plugins or techniques do you use to disable JavaScript while keeping the flexibility to whitelist some of the websites where JavaScript can be enabled?

rickycook 9y ago
i love “is blocker” for safari; it’s hugely configurable with regexes, allowing things on some domains only, allowing globally from some domains, blocking of canvas elements, XHR requests, frames, plenty more too!
- foo101 9y ago
  When you use a thing like "is blocker", do you still need a separate ad blocker or is the JavaScript blocker sufficient to block ads as well?
  - rickycook 9y ago
    sorry i didn’t see the reply... i meant “js blocker” and auto correct happened. i use ublock as well, because it picks up on regexes for things like piwik (you could have something like https://somesite.com/piwik.js https://somesite.com/piwik.js allowed because you just unblock somesite.com, or ga hosted locally etc)