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Surprisingly well, from my own experience. It can even increase your productivity and dicrease distractions: it blocks most ads, suppresses annoying "interactiv

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.
  - jraph 9y ago
    > How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? I don't know if I qualify as a skillful JS developer, but I run a website displaying pictures that works correctly without Javascript. However, Javascript makes this website way faster, smoother and easier on the connection by downloading only the moving parts when clicking on a link, carefully preserving history so back/next works as if this script did nothing. When Javascript is disabled, an ugly white flash appears when navigating between some pages and rendering is just slower, even though it remains decent (my code is minimalist anyway…) When leaving the page of a picture to come back to the album it is in, scroll position is restored. This is impossible without Javascript. History Back button is not sufficient: you might have looked at 10 pictures before coming back to the album. Sure, you can still ask your browser to come back 10 pages ago, but this is less convenient than just clicking on a cross. It also help dimension images correctly, which I could not manage to do using pure CSS, unfortunately. No Javascript tracker is present. You want Javascript enabled on this website because it helps using less resources and makes things easier to use. This is a 9 KB Javascript file that gets compressed to 3 KB and served using HTTP2 only once, so this is basically a null cost when considering how much a picture weighs (~ 100KB). And this is free software, for the sake of it. But you cannot know this on random websites. Problem is, Javascript is not used like this in general. Unfortunately for websites like this one, disabling Javascript by default is still a reasonable thing to do. Worse, visitors of this website that disable Javascript won't be aware of that, because things pretty much work as expected and I don't display a warning message.

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.
- jraph 9y ago
  > How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions? I don't know if I qualify as a skillful JS developer, but I run a website displaying pictures that works correctly without Javascript. However, Javascript makes this website way faster, smoother and easier on the connection by downloading only the moving parts when clicking on a link, carefully preserving history so back/next works as if this script did nothing. When Javascript is disabled, an ugly white flash appears when navigating between some pages and rendering is just slower, even though it remains decent (my code is minimalist anyway…) When leaving the page of a picture to come back to the album it is in, scroll position is restored. This is impossible without Javascript. History Back button is not sufficient: you might have looked at 10 pictures before coming back to the album. Sure, you can still ask your browser to come back 10 pages ago, but this is less convenient than just clicking on a cross. It also help dimension images correctly, which I could not manage to do using pure CSS, unfortunately. No Javascript tracker is present. You want Javascript enabled on this website because it helps using less resources and makes things easier to use. This is a 9 KB Javascript file that gets compressed to 3 KB and served using HTTP2 only once, so this is basically a null cost when considering how much a picture weighs (~ 100KB). And this is free software, for the sake of it. But you cannot know this on random websites. Problem is, Javascript is not used like this in general. Unfortunately for websites like this one, disabling Javascript by default is still a reasonable thing to do. Worse, visitors of this website that disable Javascript won't be aware of that, because things pretty much work as expected and I don't display a warning message.