27 ms·

Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

122 points by mhr_online 8y ago

staticelf 8y ago
I like that he offers solutions but honestly, more people are vision impaired than have javascript disabled so instead of doing all that work instead put it first on helping people with disabilities. > There is a danger that more and more sites will require JavaScript to render any content at all. What danger, exactly? While some sites that don't require a lot of js is nice you will soon notice that many sites you want js on. Music streaming services is one example. I build api based sites nowdays because of mainly two reasons: 1. They feel more rapid after initial load and gives the user a better experience. 2. You can use the same api for web and mobile experiences. I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread. Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. I've only done toy projects with WebAssembly, so I could easily be missing something, but it seems to be: 1) Overkill for most websites 2) Significantly more complicated than current web development - which is saying something given the explosion in complexity of recent web development practices Obviously #2 can be lessened as time goes on, but it's hard for me to imagine #1 ever being false. It's great for performance-sensitive applications like games, but it doesn't seem to offer much benefit for CRUD apps or static sites.
  - gramstrong 8y ago
    Maybe it's overkill, but hardly anymore than the V8 engine is for most websites. Compilation to WebAssembly will be at zero or little cost to the developer, so it shouldn't matter either way.
- zeveb 8y ago
  > I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread. I really hope not. I don't believe we've seen the last of exploits like Spectre & Meltdown. Allowing anyone in the world to execute code on the same machine whose memory contains your bank accounts, your private memos, your passwords &c. will, I hope, come to be seen as riskier & riskier as time goes on.
  - jrvidal 8y ago
    I think your fears are a bit misguided. WebAssembly runs within the same sandbox as JavaScript code. I don't see how this would constitute a _higher_ security risk than browsers as they stand today.
    - zeveb 8y ago
      WebAssembly isn't a higher risk than JavaScript — what's a higher risk is increasing the use of JavaScript and/or WebAssembly. I fear that in the not-too-distant future web pages will simply be blobs of WebAssembly which paint UIs within a browser, and general-purpose computers will have become TV terminals — but TV terminals which allow the modern equivalents of networks & newspapers to steal one's private information.
      - krapp 8y ago
        >I fear that in the not-too-distant future web pages will simply be blobs of WebAssembly which paint UIs within a browser, Some will, probably, but there's no reason all web pages will go that way. "App" type sites almost certainly, maybe streaming services, but the benefit just isn't worth the cost for most sites. It didn't happen with Java, it didn't happen with Flash, it didn't happen with Silverlight, it didn't even happen with javascript even though it's possible to publish an entire web UI as an obfuscated "javascript blob" that writes on a canvas. It hasn't happened now that most people surf the web on walled garden Android phones, arguably the antithesis of a "general purpose computer" and closer to the "TV terminal" you described. Why is Webassembly the straw that will break the web's back? If almost no one actually wants to build the dystopian scenario you're afraid of, and doing so would probably be impossible, why be afraid of it?
- 2RTZZSro 8y ago
  If WebAssembly is the future for large consulting gigs
jakecopp 8y ago
Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.
- natbobc 8y ago
  Will need to look at that! I've disabled JS ever since the spectre/meltdown CVE announcement and only enabled it for a select few sites. Now if I hit a SPA site I just close the browser tab unless it's something I really need and want. It's ludicrous how many "doc" and "brochure" sites aren't functional w/out JS enabled.
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    I agree, it can be ridiculous! It's also interesting seeing how many tracker domains each site tries to hit, definitely changes your opinion on different sites.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Or install uMatrix alongside uBO. Having just one is certainly less hassle, but uMatrix gives more granular control over what's allowed by the first/third party domains than uBO's advanced mode.
- pkhagah 8y ago
  Same here. In addition, if I think I will visit certain website only once, I open it in private mode and disable umatrix for all domains in the site for a quick view.
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    I use Firefox containers along with cookie autodelete so each tab gets a clean slate unless I've auto-mapped it to a container (where I've white-listed cookies - eg. a Facebook container where I only visit facebook.com) Much safer to disable umatrix in the normal tabs then.
iliasku 8y ago
i do it every day
waldfee 8y ago
the 600kb isn't even that bad. it's 2x the amount of requests that makes it so much worse
- klez 8y ago
  For perspective that's approx. a quarter of the size of the original DooM. And it's probably minified. And it does little more than fetching info from a couple data sources, formatting and showing it.
- addicted 8y ago
  The JS version loads 4times slower, despite only needing 600kb more. Goes to show how much effect the large number of requests have.
everdev 8y ago
Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels like JS is a hammer to fix the nail of the page reload. I always thought it was too bad that browsers choose to show the blank page instead of sending the request and just rendering the difference themselves.
- wgerard 8y ago
  > I always thought it was too bad that browsers choose to show the blank page instead of sending the request and just rendering the difference themselves. FWIW there are libraries that work around this, e.g. turbolinks - which I heavily suspect Github is using, and is probably a large part of why they're able to support progressive enhancement.
- realusername 8y ago
  > Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. I still do that on my case, a good 95% of the features I develop work without Javascript. One additional benefit is that if your JS crash for any reason, most of the things are still working.
  - brightball 8y ago
    I continue to do it as well. Web frameworks make it so easy it’s hard to justify not doing it. There are so few web apps that actually need the SPA treatment. It’s a lot simpler to ignore the tool chain headaches that come from committing to the SPA when you don’t need it and gracefully degrade. It’s so rare that I actually run into an SPA that doesn’t feel slow...I just wonder why people bother sometimes.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
rhacker 8y ago
The referenced site BlockMetry.com doesn't seem to go into how it calculated 0.2% as having JS disabled. Especially since it references Tor traffic as a high percentage my guess is that each connection was coming into the site with different fully-wiped Http connections basically disabling tracking. Alternatively what percentage of that traffic is simply cache bots for search engines, etc...
halite 8y ago
Might as well try living a day without water.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  JavaScript is not water. JavaScript is Brawndo, the sports drink. Used in business of watering plants. Because it has electrolytes.
codedokode 8y ago
The web works much better without JS, sites load faster and browser takes less memory. But sadly many sites use preloaders or plugins that hide entire page content until JS is loaded. What an awful idea.
nabla9 8y ago
http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Every site should have a plain html option. Or create their html so that it works fine without js or cnn.
- sjmulder 8y ago
  I'm trying to assemble a list: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html but so far there aren't many sites like this that I found useful.
  - midasz 8y ago
    Oooh cool, is noslite actually by the nos? I can only applaud this effort!
    - sjmulder 8y ago
      Don't think so but I love it. I use it all the time on my 2G featurephone and it flies. I made a lite version of a job listing site I'm working on but its go live approval got lost in bureaucracy.
  - dublinben 8y ago
    You might also like https://www.techdirt.com/?_format=lite https://www.techdirt.com/?_format=lite for tech news.
    - sjmulder 8y ago
      That's really nice, thanks!
  - icebraining 8y ago
    There was an HN thread on such sites last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337948
overcast 8y ago
As much as I'd love for the majority of JS to go away, there is no denying the usefulness of AJAX in web forms. Doing page submit is not a better experience for the user or the developer. That's basically the only piece that I can't see going without.
- prophesi 8y ago
  Yeah, I only want Javascript for when it actually speeds up a site. Which, from my experience, is simply: AJAX for all form submissions Service Worker for caching Turbolinks[0] for page navigation And those are easy to implement as progressive enhancements. If JS is disabled, the submit button does a regular page submit, the Service Worker is simply not registered and instead uses your web server's cache policy, and your links remain as regular hyperlinks. [0] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks
  - overcast 8y ago
    Honestly wouldn't bother with forms failing over. That sounds like double the work to support a few people. If you want to participate, enable JS, otherwise view the site as read only.
    - prophesi 8y ago
      Not sure if I follow? For a form submission, you'd set it up like a normal HTML form. The <input type="submit"> would do it's regular thing. If Javascript is enabled, then you'd hijack the button with event.preventDefault and do your AJAX.
      - overcast 8y ago
        If I'm client side, as well as server side checking inputs with JSON responses, there is going to be overlapping of work. Particularly annoying when carrying over field/errors across submit pages. Old school submit, check, refresh, show errors, is an ugly experience for end users. Of course it can be done, not something I'm going to worry about as a solo operating and developing multiple ventures.
ibdf 8y ago
Oh my lord, this article is non-sense. Had you gone to a website and had not been able to read anything I would say... good point. But you went to a Wordpress admin to prove your point. Lord have mercy... you're really going to hate your experience once WP switches to a JS based editor. Quick, let's try using Facebook and other apps built on JS frameworks and complain about the functionality not working. Let's try searching data tables with JS off, and let's try making ajax requests to load data over time instead all at once. It's not only in your browser it's in your phones, in apps that provide you services you can't live without. These type of articles are a shame and are only written to instigate fights among developers. The world is using JS, it's on every major app. Get over it or make something better.
- moistoreos 8y ago
  Cue web assembly advocates.
- 80386 8y ago
  I know a guy who built a single-page web app for a blog. Really. It takes a few seconds to load the post titles, it'll make your computer grind to a halt if you have more than two tabs of it open, it took months to write, and it doesn't do anything you couldn't do with plain HTML and some AJAX request handlers... but Brawndo has electrolytes! I bet it looks pretty good on his resume.
  - ry_ry 8y ago
    I know a guy that made a model ship in his spare time. It doesn't carry any passengers or cargo, doesn't meet even the most basic safety standards, and frankly doesn't do anything you couldn't do with a canoe. I bet it looks pretty good on his mantelpiece. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself - does it matter that he built (what I assume is a personal) blog in framework du jour, simply he just wanted to?
    - 80386 8y ago
      Not a personal blog -- this was a paid job to replace an old platform that a community was using but could no longer maintain.
stepvhen 8y ago
i want to invite others to try to visit Yelp on mobile with JS turned off. first off, you canr access anything. then the website provides nonsense reasons for why a user should have js turned on, and tries to guilt the user into doing do. i always have js off by default, and turn it on momentarily when i feel it necessary. i do not feel it necessary for yelp.
CodeTheInternet 8y ago
I'm glad he can code his brochureware site with minimal impact when JS is disabled. It is 2018 and every site is driven by JS, not just DOM events. If you disable JS, you know what you're getting into. Do we need to develop for those that decide to block CSS? Insist on deprecated browsers? You develop for your audience.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  So you've never heard of the CSS naked day? Or visually impaired users and accessibility?
  - danmg 8y ago
    I disable css when it's some article with some annoying low contrast.
- Grumbledour 8y ago
  What do you mean, " Do we need to develop for those that decide to block CSS"? Surely, you write semantic, standards compliant html and thus your site works just fine without css? If it does not, have you ever heard of accessibility? If that's no argument for you to do it right, search engines also like clean, structured html. Of course, it also helps with the javascript integration. ;-)
parvenu74 8y ago
When the statistical body of internet users who refuse to use JavaScrpit are expressed in terms of a market to whom custom (JS-free) experiences will induce them to pay money for products and services we'll begin to see businesses create JS-free experiences for them. Are there marketing-specific attributes of anti-JS web users?
- etatoby 8y ago
  We simply get information on what stuff to buy from websites that work and ignore those that are broken. My mobile browsing experience has been immensely better since I installed Brave and set it to block everything by default, including js. When I'm presented with a blank page (not very often) I evaluate in a split second whether the several seconds needed to reload the site with js enabled are worth its content. 90% of the times the answer is no, so I click Back and then try the next search engine result for the same query. 10% of the time I really want to see or use that particular website, so I enable js for it on Brave's panel and wait for it to reload. Summary: 1 additional click and 1 additional reload (to be only paid once) on websites I care about. ∞ less nuisance on everything else.
danjme1 8y ago
Most content specific sites (which is what we're talking about right?) and Wordpress et al have RSS feeds out of the box, if you're that obsessed with making browsing that fast surely aggregating feeds is by far the fastest way to browse?
danjme1 8y ago
RSS, anyone?
kome 8y ago
I am not a developer, I can write just html+css. For my personal website (http://mrtno.com/ http://mrtno.com/) I use just static pages written by hand. No JS needed, no stupid complexities. I wonder why if I can sell my lack of skill on the market... because the skilled designers/coders are programing a web that really has a tendency to be so bloated. I browse the web with no-script (firefox extension); and many websites won't even load without scripts. I wonder why. For many many website I don't see the need to have JS around at all. Can the lack of skills be a skill? :) hire me!
Rapzid 8y ago
Somebody should create a list of JS free sites. They can sell it at Whole Foods in the "medicine" aisle. You guys know what I'm talking about; "JS Free -All Natural!". I think we've about reached the point of ideology on this. If you are considering arguing with the other side your probably better off arguing evolution with a creationist, or facts with the GOP.
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  What a tremendously rude comment. I can't believe you need so many hundreds of karma points to downvote what is clearly a non-contribution.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Well, I'm not sure if it was meant to be helpful, but I would like a "list", or better yet, a search engine, that excludes all sites with javascript. If there is no such widely used search engine, then sites without scripting can't thrive. I've never been an ideological seeker of "organic, all natural" type foods, because the criteria tend to seem arbitrary and unscientific, but I've come to see the label as useful because the other stuff is increasingly adulterated with garbage I don't want.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >If there is no such widely used search engine, then sites without scripting can't thrive. Such a search engine would never be widely used, because there's no widespread desire to limit search results only to sites which don't use javascript.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        It's a chicken and egg question. People don't know they want it, but they can't find out they want it either. I don't mind javascript or ads per se, but the bandwidth and processing requirements of modern ad-heavy web pages are becoming unmanageable for me. My breaking point is where, even using WiFi at home all the time, I am still going over 1GB a month for my cell usage away from home. And equally as important, pages are infuriatingly slow on both laptop and phone, even though I have a relatively recent and high powered phone.
godshatter 8y ago
The author talks about "noscript" and makes it clear that it's not a reference to the html tag but to the idea of surfing the web without javascript. I was waiting for a discussion of NoScript, the popular add-on for Firefox that blocks javascript by default and allows for turning it back on on a site-by-site basis. I surf the web, as I have for many years, with NoScript turned on and as few permanent domains white-listed as I can get away with for security reasons. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but my guess is that the population of people who use the NoScript add-on dwarfs the population of users that actually disable their javascript in their browser. I'm not sure how someone like me shows up in their numbers, but I suspect that I would be on the "blocks javascript" list and then on the "uses javascript" list if I am intrigued enough about the site to enable some of the domains it requests javascript from. I don't know if web developers take that into account or not, but I suspect they don't because the number of domains I have to experimentally temporarily enable just to see some parts of some sites is getting even more ridiculous these days. Maybe someone should design a new protocol that is built for interactivity from the start instead of one designed around static content with back-flips needed to make it usably interactive.
JoshMnem 8y ago
I do that every day with uMatrix[1], only overriding hosts when needed. I also turn off all CSS animation with Stylus.[2] The Web is becoming unusable without that. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
samirillian 8y ago
Honestly, I don't see the wordpress backend as a relevant test case. Whoever else you might be catering to, it's fair to assume that someone building a website would have JavaScript enabled while developing.
- majewsky 8y ago
  90+% of the people using Wordpress backends do not build websites. They just author content.
  - samirillian 8y ago
    Content authors either
textmode 8y ago
"I Used The Web For A Day With Javascript Turned Off." I Used the Web For A Decade With Javascript Turned Off. I have been using the Web for over a decade via software that has no Javascript capabilities. There is a conception one can detect in this article that there is only one "working" look for any website: the look that the designer intended. However IME many websites "work" without ever engaging the "look" the designer intended. To discuss this, one needs to first specifically define what it means for a website to "work". I am not sure agreement can be reached on that issue. It may be that the definition of "work" varies with each user. Different users may want different experiences. I know what I want from websites: data. I am less concerned with design. This may not be the case for another user. The author cites Amazon as an example website. When I am only browsing Amazon I do not use a "modern" web browser nor Javascript. Without a browser nor Javascript I can download product data in bulk, convert it to CSV and import it into kdb+ for easier searching and viewing. Without a browser nor Javascript I can download images of interesting products and embed them into a simple PDF for offline viewing, using pdflib. When I am ready to purchase, then I might move to a "modern" browser with Javascript-enabled. Other example websites he gives are Wordpress, Github, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. I read the content of all these sites without ever using a "modern" browser nor Javascript. If I want to view images or video, I can download them as in the above case of Amazon. I may choose to view the data in whatever application I choose on whatever computer I choose on the local network, and the computer need not be connected to the internet. For this user, these websites "work" just fine without Javascript. I can always use a "modern" browser with Javascript if I want to see what the designer intended. However this is rarely necessary for the experience I seek.
NoGravitas 8y ago
Meanwhile: requests blocked on this page 168 or 96%
NVRM 8y ago
W3M !!! Well done pages runs fine in w3m. Think about viewing it in 20 years. Another good test is to see the rendering in archive.org .

122 points by mhr_online 8y ago

I like that he offers solutions but honestly, more people are vision impaired than have javascript disabled so instead of doing all that work instead put it first on helping people with disabilities. > There is a danger that more and more sites will require JavaScript to render any content at all. What danger, exactly? While some sites that don't require a lot of js is nice you will soon notice that many sites you want js on. Music streaming services is one example. I build api based sites nowdays because of mainly two reasons: 1. They feel more rapid after initial load and gives the user a better experience. 2. You can use the same api for web and mobile experiences. I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread.

wgerard 8y ago
> I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread. Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. I've only done toy projects with WebAssembly, so I could easily be missing something, but it seems to be: 1) Overkill for most websites 2) Significantly more complicated than current web development - which is saying something given the explosion in complexity of recent web development practices Obviously #2 can be lessened as time goes on, but it's hard for me to imagine #1 ever being false. It's great for performance-sensitive applications like games, but it doesn't seem to offer much benefit for CRUD apps or static sites.
- gramstrong 8y ago
  Maybe it's overkill, but hardly anymore than the V8 engine is for most websites. Compilation to WebAssembly will be at zero or little cost to the developer, so it shouldn't matter either way.
zeveb 8y ago
> I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread. I really hope not. I don't believe we've seen the last of exploits like Spectre & Meltdown. Allowing anyone in the world to execute code on the same machine whose memory contains your bank accounts, your private memos, your passwords &c. will, I hope, come to be seen as riskier & riskier as time goes on.
- jrvidal 8y ago
  I think your fears are a bit misguided. WebAssembly runs within the same sandbox as JavaScript code. I don't see how this would constitute a _higher_ security risk than browsers as they stand today.
  - zeveb 8y ago
    WebAssembly isn't a higher risk than JavaScript — what's a higher risk is increasing the use of JavaScript and/or WebAssembly. I fear that in the not-too-distant future web pages will simply be blobs of WebAssembly which paint UIs within a browser, and general-purpose computers will have become TV terminals — but TV terminals which allow the modern equivalents of networks & newspapers to steal one's private information.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >I fear that in the not-too-distant future web pages will simply be blobs of WebAssembly which paint UIs within a browser, Some will, probably, but there's no reason all web pages will go that way. "App" type sites almost certainly, maybe streaming services, but the benefit just isn't worth the cost for most sites. It didn't happen with Java, it didn't happen with Flash, it didn't happen with Silverlight, it didn't even happen with javascript even though it's possible to publish an entire web UI as an obfuscated "javascript blob" that writes on a canvas. It hasn't happened now that most people surf the web on walled garden Android phones, arguably the antithesis of a "general purpose computer" and closer to the "TV terminal" you described. Why is Webassembly the straw that will break the web's back? If almost no one actually wants to build the dystopian scenario you're afraid of, and doing so would probably be impossible, why be afraid of it?
2RTZZSro 8y ago
If WebAssembly is the future for large consulting gigs

jakecopp 8y ago

Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.

natbobc 8y ago
Will need to look at that! I've disabled JS ever since the spectre/meltdown CVE announcement and only enabled it for a select few sites. Now if I hit a SPA site I just close the browser tab unless it's something I really need and want. It's ludicrous how many "doc" and "brochure" sites aren't functional w/out JS enabled.
- jakecopp 8y ago
  I agree, it can be ridiculous! It's also interesting seeing how many tracker domains each site tries to hit, definitely changes your opinion on different sites.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Or install uMatrix alongside uBO. Having just one is certainly less hassle, but uMatrix gives more granular control over what's allowed by the first/third party domains than uBO's advanced mode.
pkhagah 8y ago
Same here. In addition, if I think I will visit certain website only once, I open it in private mode and disable umatrix for all domains in the site for a quick view.
- jakecopp 8y ago
  I use Firefox containers along with cookie autodelete so each tab gets a clean slate unless I've auto-mapped it to a container (where I've white-listed cookies - eg. a Facebook container where I only visit facebook.com) Much safer to disable umatrix in the normal tabs then.

iliasku 8y ago

i do it every day

waldfee 8y ago

the 600kb isn't even that bad. it's 2x the amount of requests that makes it so much worse

klez 8y ago
For perspective that's approx. a quarter of the size of the original DooM. And it's probably minified. And it does little more than fetching info from a couple data sources, formatting and showing it.
addicted 8y ago
The JS version loads 4times slower, despite only needing 600kb more. Goes to show how much effect the large number of requests have.

everdev 8y ago

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels like JS is a hammer to fix the nail of the page reload. I always thought it was too bad that browsers choose to show the blank page instead of sending the request and just rendering the difference themselves.

wgerard 8y ago
> I always thought it was too bad that browsers choose to show the blank page instead of sending the request and just rendering the difference themselves. FWIW there are libraries that work around this, e.g. turbolinks - which I heavily suspect Github is using, and is probably a large part of why they're able to support progressive enhancement.
realusername 8y ago
> Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. I still do that on my case, a good 95% of the features I develop work without Javascript. One additional benefit is that if your JS crash for any reason, most of the things are still working.
- brightball 8y ago
  I continue to do it as well. Web frameworks make it so easy it’s hard to justify not doing it. There are so few web apps that actually need the SPA treatment. It’s a lot simpler to ignore the tool chain headaches that come from committing to the SPA when you don’t need it and gracefully degrade. It’s so rare that I actually run into an SPA that doesn’t feel slow...I just wonder why people bother sometimes.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago

rhacker 8y ago

The referenced site BlockMetry.com doesn't seem to go into how it calculated 0.2% as having JS disabled. Especially since it references Tor traffic as a high percentage my guess is that each connection was coming into the site with different fully-wiped Http connections basically disabling tracking. Alternatively what percentage of that traffic is simply cache bots for search engines, etc...

halite 8y ago

Might as well try living a day without water.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
JavaScript is not water. JavaScript is Brawndo, the sports drink. Used in business of watering plants. Because it has electrolytes.

codedokode 8y ago

The web works much better without JS, sites load faster and browser takes less memory. But sadly many sites use preloaders or plugins that hide entire page content until JS is loaded. What an awful idea.

nabla9 8y ago

http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ Every site should have a plain html option. Or create their html so that it works fine without js or cnn.

sjmulder 8y ago
I'm trying to assemble a list: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html but so far there aren't many sites like this that I found useful.
- midasz 8y ago
  Oooh cool, is noslite actually by the nos? I can only applaud this effort!
  - sjmulder 8y ago
    Don't think so but I love it. I use it all the time on my 2G featurephone and it flies. I made a lite version of a job listing site I'm working on but its go live approval got lost in bureaucracy.
- dublinben 8y ago
  You might also like https://www.techdirt.com/?_format=lite https://www.techdirt.com/?_format=lite for tech news.
  - sjmulder 8y ago
    That's really nice, thanks!
- icebraining 8y ago
  There was an HN thread on such sites last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337948

overcast 8y ago

As much as I'd love for the majority of JS to go away, there is no denying the usefulness of AJAX in web forms. Doing page submit is not a better experience for the user or the developer. That's basically the only piece that I can't see going without.

prophesi 8y ago
Yeah, I only want Javascript for when it actually speeds up a site. Which, from my experience, is simply: AJAX for all form submissions Service Worker for caching Turbolinks[0] for page navigation And those are easy to implement as progressive enhancements. If JS is disabled, the submit button does a regular page submit, the Service Worker is simply not registered and instead uses your web server's cache policy, and your links remain as regular hyperlinks. [0] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks
- overcast 8y ago
  Honestly wouldn't bother with forms failing over. That sounds like double the work to support a few people. If you want to participate, enable JS, otherwise view the site as read only.
  - prophesi 8y ago
    Not sure if I follow? For a form submission, you'd set it up like a normal HTML form. The <input type="submit"> would do it's regular thing. If Javascript is enabled, then you'd hijack the button with event.preventDefault and do your AJAX.
    - overcast 8y ago
      If I'm client side, as well as server side checking inputs with JSON responses, there is going to be overlapping of work. Particularly annoying when carrying over field/errors across submit pages. Old school submit, check, refresh, show errors, is an ugly experience for end users. Of course it can be done, not something I'm going to worry about as a solo operating and developing multiple ventures.

ibdf 8y ago

Oh my lord, this article is non-sense. Had you gone to a website and had not been able to read anything I would say... good point. But you went to a Wordpress admin to prove your point. Lord have mercy... you're really going to hate your experience once WP switches to a JS based editor. Quick, let's try using Facebook and other apps built on JS frameworks and complain about the functionality not working. Let's try searching data tables with JS off, and let's try making ajax requests to load data over time instead all at once. It's not only in your browser it's in your phones, in apps that provide you services you can't live without. These type of articles are a shame and are only written to instigate fights among developers. The world is using JS, it's on every major app. Get over it or make something better.

moistoreos 8y ago
Cue web assembly advocates.
80386 8y ago
I know a guy who built a single-page web app for a blog. Really. It takes a few seconds to load the post titles, it'll make your computer grind to a halt if you have more than two tabs of it open, it took months to write, and it doesn't do anything you couldn't do with plain HTML and some AJAX request handlers... but Brawndo has electrolytes! I bet it looks pretty good on his resume.
- ry_ry 8y ago
  I know a guy that made a model ship in his spare time. It doesn't carry any passengers or cargo, doesn't meet even the most basic safety standards, and frankly doesn't do anything you couldn't do with a canoe. I bet it looks pretty good on his mantelpiece. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself - does it matter that he built (what I assume is a personal) blog in framework du jour, simply he just wanted to?
  - 80386 8y ago
    Not a personal blog -- this was a paid job to replace an old platform that a community was using but could no longer maintain.

stepvhen 8y ago

i want to invite others to try to visit Yelp on mobile with JS turned off. first off, you canr access anything. then the website provides nonsense reasons for why a user should have js turned on, and tries to guilt the user into doing do. i always have js off by default, and turn it on momentarily when i feel it necessary. i do not feel it necessary for yelp.

CodeTheInternet 8y ago

I'm glad he can code his brochureware site with minimal impact when JS is disabled. It is 2018 and every site is driven by JS, not just DOM events. If you disable JS, you know what you're getting into. Do we need to develop for those that decide to block CSS? Insist on deprecated browsers? You develop for your audience.

TuringTest 8y ago
So you've never heard of the CSS naked day? Or visually impaired users and accessibility?
- danmg 8y ago
  I disable css when it's some article with some annoying low contrast.
Grumbledour 8y ago
What do you mean, " Do we need to develop for those that decide to block CSS"? Surely, you write semantic, standards compliant html and thus your site works just fine without css? If it does not, have you ever heard of accessibility? If that's no argument for you to do it right, search engines also like clean, structured html. Of course, it also helps with the javascript integration. ;-)

parvenu74 8y ago

When the statistical body of internet users who refuse to use JavaScrpit are expressed in terms of a market to whom custom (JS-free) experiences will induce them to pay money for products and services we'll begin to see businesses create JS-free experiences for them. Are there marketing-specific attributes of anti-JS web users?

etatoby 8y ago
We simply get information on what stuff to buy from websites that work and ignore those that are broken. My mobile browsing experience has been immensely better since I installed Brave and set it to block everything by default, including js. When I'm presented with a blank page (not very often) I evaluate in a split second whether the several seconds needed to reload the site with js enabled are worth its content. 90% of the times the answer is no, so I click Back and then try the next search engine result for the same query. 10% of the time I really want to see or use that particular website, so I enable js for it on Brave's panel and wait for it to reload. Summary: 1 additional click and 1 additional reload (to be only paid once) on websites I care about. ∞ less nuisance on everything else.

danjme1 8y ago

Most content specific sites (which is what we're talking about right?) and Wordpress et al have RSS feeds out of the box, if you're that obsessed with making browsing that fast surely aggregating feeds is by far the fastest way to browse?

danjme1 8y ago

RSS, anyone?

kome 8y ago

I am not a developer, I can write just html+css. For my personal website (http://mrtno.com/ http://mrtno.com/) I use just static pages written by hand. No JS needed, no stupid complexities. I wonder why if I can sell my lack of skill on the market... because the skilled designers/coders are programing a web that really has a tendency to be so bloated. I browse the web with no-script (firefox extension); and many websites won't even load without scripts. I wonder why. For many many website I don't see the need to have JS around at all. Can the lack of skills be a skill? :) hire me!

Rapzid 8y ago

Somebody should create a list of JS free sites. They can sell it at Whole Foods in the "medicine" aisle. You guys know what I'm talking about; "JS Free -All Natural!". I think we've about reached the point of ideology on this. If you are considering arguing with the other side your probably better off arguing evolution with a creationist, or facts with the GOP.

andrewmcwatters 8y ago
What a tremendously rude comment. I can't believe you need so many hundreds of karma points to downvote what is clearly a non-contribution.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  Well, I'm not sure if it was meant to be helpful, but I would like a "list", or better yet, a search engine, that excludes all sites with javascript. If there is no such widely used search engine, then sites without scripting can't thrive. I've never been an ideological seeker of "organic, all natural" type foods, because the criteria tend to seem arbitrary and unscientific, but I've come to see the label as useful because the other stuff is increasingly adulterated with garbage I don't want.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >If there is no such widely used search engine, then sites without scripting can't thrive. Such a search engine would never be widely used, because there's no widespread desire to limit search results only to sites which don't use javascript.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      It's a chicken and egg question. People don't know they want it, but they can't find out they want it either. I don't mind javascript or ads per se, but the bandwidth and processing requirements of modern ad-heavy web pages are becoming unmanageable for me. My breaking point is where, even using WiFi at home all the time, I am still going over 1GB a month for my cell usage away from home. And equally as important, pages are infuriatingly slow on both laptop and phone, even though I have a relatively recent and high powered phone.

godshatter 8y ago

The author talks about "noscript" and makes it clear that it's not a reference to the html tag but to the idea of surfing the web without javascript. I was waiting for a discussion of NoScript, the popular add-on for Firefox that blocks javascript by default and allows for turning it back on on a site-by-site basis. I surf the web, as I have for many years, with NoScript turned on and as few permanent domains white-listed as I can get away with for security reasons. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but my guess is that the population of people who use the NoScript add-on dwarfs the population of users that actually disable their javascript in their browser. I'm not sure how someone like me shows up in their numbers, but I suspect that I would be on the "blocks javascript" list and then on the "uses javascript" list if I am intrigued enough about the site to enable some of the domains it requests javascript from. I don't know if web developers take that into account or not, but I suspect they don't because the number of domains I have to experimentally temporarily enable just to see some parts of some sites is getting even more ridiculous these days. Maybe someone should design a new protocol that is built for interactivity from the start instead of one designed around static content with back-flips needed to make it usably interactive.

JoshMnem 8y ago

I do that every day with uMatrix[1], only overriding hosts when needed. I also turn off all CSS animation with Stylus.[2] The Web is becoming unusable without that. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

samirillian 8y ago

Honestly, I don't see the wordpress backend as a relevant test case. Whoever else you might be catering to, it's fair to assume that someone building a website would have JavaScript enabled while developing.

majewsky 8y ago
90+% of the people using Wordpress backends do not build websites. They just author content.
- samirillian 8y ago
  Content authors either

textmode 8y ago

"I Used The Web For A Day With Javascript Turned Off." I Used the Web For A Decade With Javascript Turned Off. I have been using the Web for over a decade via software that has no Javascript capabilities. There is a conception one can detect in this article that there is only one "working" look for any website: the look that the designer intended. However IME many websites "work" without ever engaging the "look" the designer intended. To discuss this, one needs to first specifically define what it means for a website to "work". I am not sure agreement can be reached on that issue. It may be that the definition of "work" varies with each user. Different users may want different experiences. I know what I want from websites: data. I am less concerned with design. This may not be the case for another user. The author cites Amazon as an example website. When I am only browsing Amazon I do not use a "modern" web browser nor Javascript. Without a browser nor Javascript I can download product data in bulk, convert it to CSV and import it into kdb+ for easier searching and viewing. Without a browser nor Javascript I can download images of interesting products and embed them into a simple PDF for offline viewing, using pdflib. When I am ready to purchase, then I might move to a "modern" browser with Javascript-enabled. Other example websites he gives are Wordpress, Github, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. I read the content of all these sites without ever using a "modern" browser nor Javascript. If I want to view images or video, I can download them as in the above case of Amazon. I may choose to view the data in whatever application I choose on whatever computer I choose on the local network, and the computer need not be connected to the internet. For this user, these websites "work" just fine without Javascript. I can always use a "modern" browser with Javascript if I want to see what the designer intended. However this is rarely necessary for the experience I seek.

NoGravitas 8y ago

Meanwhile: requests blocked on this page 168 or 96%

NVRM 8y ago

W3M !!! Well done pages runs fine in w3m. Think about viewing it in 20 years. Another good test is to see the rendering in archive.org .