6 ms·

Turn Off JavaScript in the Browser and Then Navigate to Slack.com

18 points by kordlessagain 6y ago

This produces infinite redirects in both Chrome and Firefox.

llacb47 6y ago
You're right but I don't think this is very interesting.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Others disagree.
altart 6y ago
Turn off javascript is like turn off the web browser.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  Not for me it isn't! The default state for JavaScript in my browser is off (has been for decades). The prizes I get for turning it off are these: • Blindingly fast speeds. My web pages usually render about three times as quickly as they do with JS on (you get spoiled by this and cannot turn back - it's like a drug the difference in speed is so great). • Ads and other screen dross are yesterday's business—even without ad blockers. • With JavaScript off, privacy comes almost by default. Below, you'll see the test results I've just obtained from EFF's Panopticlick with JS off. Wonderful results aren't they. • This post was done without JavaScript. • The sites that I usually visit are either not heavy with or overloaded with JS scripts. Moreover, the kind of sites I'm interested in contain the types of material that no one cares about if you switch JS off. • If sites don't let me in or screw me around then I'm out of there as fast as I can hit the backspace key. (There's more fish in the internet sea than I can ever visit in multiple lifetimes—so there's no need for me to stick around.) • If you must need to use JavaScript, then this fact alone is already violating your privacy to some extent. I now know the types of sites you will most likely visit and also the kind of data that you're likely to consume or use. I can also make assumptions about you without even going any further. I won't bother pushing the point further, as the cognoscenti who don't use JS already know they're ahead of the game. They also know that trying to get JS fanboys to kick the JS habit makes converting Apple users away from Apple look like child's play. (Who cares? Just let them wallow around in their JS-ridden environment. They're not going to be useful allies in the war on privacy anyway, or they'd already be in a JS-free environment.) EFF's Panopticlick: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Browser Characteristic value User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5 HTTP_ACCEPT Headers application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain; q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 gzip, deflate, br en-US,en;q=0.5 Browser Plugin Details no javascript Time Zone Offset no javascript Time Zone no javascript Screen Size and Color Depth no javascript System Fonts no javascript Are Cookies Enabled? Yes Limited supercookie test no javascript Hash of canvas fingerprint no javascript Hash of WebGL fingerprint no javascript WebGL Vendor & Renderer no javascript DNT Header Enabled? False Language no javascript Platform no javascript Touch Support no javascript Ad Blocker Used no javascript AudioContext fingerprint no javascript CPU Class no javascript Hardware Concurrency no javascript Device Memory (GB no javascript Note: even the User Agent is wrong! The machine I'm using is actually an old Windows 7 laptop. Damn good privacy for just nuking JS I reckon.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    So is the i686 part incorrect also? I was about to say, who is even still on that in 2020
    - hilbert42 6y ago
      No. It's old but it's a decent Win 7 machine, that's why I still use it. My Linux boxes are even more up to date.
  - barry27 6y ago
    This is borderline hysterical.
  - XCSme 6y ago
    > Blindingly fast speeds The thing is, with JavaScript you can make websites a lot faster than without, but most of JS is not used for "good". For example, it's a lot faster when you click an upvote button to just update the button state/score immediately than to refresh the page.
    - hilbert42 6y ago
      I totally agree, and there's nothing wrong with JavaScript per se. The original purpose of JS made sense. The trouble is that's it's been grossly abused by web sites on two fronts. The first is bloat and the second is privacy. Web pages with multiple megabytes of data per page are just not on in my view but they're commonplace and seemingly getting worse. The second is using JS as spyware. If you look at the table in my post it's clear what I mean, this info should be off limits to remote servers. I've long advocated that we need modified JS engines in browsers that would hand control back to users. For instance, the parameters above could be singlely or collectively turned off or on in setings. Alternatively, the user could set one or more of these parameters to provide the server with spoofed info. If that became popular then web sites would discontinue the process as the data would be useless.
      - zzo38computer 6y ago
perilunar 6y ago
Safari too.
Raed667 6y ago
Turn off JavaScript then navigate to a web app. Act shocked that it doesn't work.
- hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
  The issue isn't, that Slack doesn'T work. The issue is, that it causes an infinite redirect loop on the slack homepage. (Additionally, I'd argue that while Slack itself may be a webapp, but its homepage is just a landing page, not a webapp)
  - zzo38computer 6y ago
    I agree. You may want to just access documentation or something like that, and that shouldn't require scripts to be enabled. Web pages that require scripts should display useful information even if the scripts are disabled; simply "You must enable JavaScript" isn't useful. Links to documentation should be included. If there is a source code repository, a link to it should be included. If it is a display of some data, links to the raw data should be included. If it calculates something, a link to documentation or source code describing the algorithm would be useful (actually, it can be useful even if you are using the web app to calculate it; you might want to know its working). If it is a web interface to other protocols such as IRC or NNTP, or some protocol that works over HTTP(S) such as ActivityPub, the relevant information (protocol, host name, port number, channel, newsgroup, etc) should be mentioned.
  - thro1 6y ago
    >.. it causes an infinite redirect loop on the slack homepage. - and on every other page. But with accessibility.blockautorefresh=true and without JavaScript the site is still usable and quite nice. There are few things that could work easily but they don't - as the 'Resources' item in the top bar could be a link as the others - but isn't. Occasionally, on some pages there are items looking [kind of] like links - but clicking on them didn't let me progress further. I can browse through slack app directory, but what I see for every app is only a logo, a name and spinning circle instead of anything else.. Actually.. after looking at the code.. there could be some simple stylish way for fixing most of this stuff - with the Stylish extension: @-moz-document url-prefix("https://slack.com/apps/") { .c-tabs__tab_panel { display:block; } .medium_bottom_margin { display: block !important; visibility: visible !important; } .infinite_spinner { display: none; } } The items looking like links which don't work, I guess, supposed to be 'buttons' in 'application'- what means there is no reference on them to related resources or actions and those are less easy to fix. I don't see really why this site pretends to need JavaScript and tries to enforce it - maybe because of some minor accessibility problems which are attempted to be fixed somehow with bigger accessibility problems, maybe it's needed on some other stages. It happens that the apps pages have most of the necessary information just in place, ready to display, but postpone it to do some network requests and processing of some kind, probably with workers. With JavaScript disabled and provided fixes they show up instantly. :)) That satisfies my use case - be able to evaluate when I could be interested in this platform and to be more in touch with such things, not quite in my focus yet, but which could become important sooner; not being forced much to stuff which I dislike or which break my flow. I mostly can't enjoy JavaScript, being stuck on obsolete browser versions because of Firefox's regression and other browsers not being even close to its earlier abilities. Finally, life is to short to fix random accessibility whatever problems, paying for it with own karma - couldn't we just not unnecessarily force barriers to each others, but gently try to make things easier, as WWW was intended ?
soulchild37 6y ago
Web dev: "you are using web browser wrong"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  User: "Stop using my processor for all your stupid stuff."
thro1 6y ago
It's a trap. Dark pattern. It's waiting to use that moment when you switch on the JavaScript for some other tab forgetting about this one, to do some nasty stuff probably. Cloudflare is doing it same way (waits for your mistake, refreshing in the background till JS will be on), but more stealthy - with longer time of refresh. They steal the bandwidth too - and Google was sued recently for eating mobile data. (JavaScript in my browser is not granted for whatever purpose I didn't needed, it's a privilege which only few sites deserve. And I have hundreds of tabs open, because.)
- kypro 6y ago
  What "nasty stuff" would Slack being doing that's worth the bandwidth / implementation costs of building a redirect loop in the unlikely case, that 1, the user disables JS; and 2, that the user occasionally reenables JS while keeping a non-functional Slack tab open?
  - thro1 6y ago
    Spinning my fan, exhausting battery and memory, segregation by compliance.
    - Bjartr 6y ago
      Can you explain this a bit more? What's the value to Slack to do this?
      - thro1 6y ago
        Those are no values but anti-values. If there is no value to Slack (and others) doing this (even so small as outsourcing costs of processing from their servers to my terminal, measuring differences) could they stop doing this ? There is no need for processing (every time).
- thro1 6y ago
  To downvoters (2+1 down, most of my karma, without comments in last hour): those are facts, not opinion. Now I'm wrong and I'm very happy with this. There was a site witch I'm not using anymore for that reason. When I used searchbox provided, Cloudflare was going in the way: 'Please stand by, while we are checking your browser... Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page.' .. but then after some time it was refreshing anyway and it would catch if I enabled JavaScript for some other reason. It was dark pattern - asking me to reload the page, but then doing it anyway, without my consent, of witch I wasn't aware for a while. I just checked it, and Cloudflare is not doing this (refreshing) anymore. :) I'm quite happy because of this (not wasting resources in some corner case), but in meantime I stopped using that site (they are not aware of it nor of the reason) and found some other, without this kind of obstacles. I wish, Slack could fix it (not me) too.
seattle_spring 6y ago
Want to see something even crazier? Check out slack.com on Internet Explorer 5. It doesn't even load!
- dave_sid 6y ago
  It works just fine in Netscape Navigator tho.
thro1 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25091823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25091823 Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads I don't have to go to slack.com . But if I go, it will keep eating my mobile data (until I switch the JavaScript on?). Why? (What else?)
thro1 6y ago
For a while worldwide and mutual penalty for it in Firefox ( in addition to blocked scripts ): accessibility.blockautorefresh=true In meantime.. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/contact-sales https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/contact-sales : 'What challenges are you looking to overcome with Slack?' 'I want to evaluate Slack for my organization.' .. but infinite redirects of slack.com website when JavaScript is not on in the web browser make it very difficult.

18 points by kordlessagain 6y ago

This produces infinite redirects in both Chrome and Firefox.

llacb47 6y ago

You're right but I don't think this is very interesting.

kordlessagain 6y ago
Others disagree.

altart 6y ago

Turn off javascript is like turn off the web browser.

hilbert42 6y ago
Not for me it isn't! The default state for JavaScript in my browser is off (has been for decades). The prizes I get for turning it off are these: • Blindingly fast speeds. My web pages usually render about three times as quickly as they do with JS on (you get spoiled by this and cannot turn back - it's like a drug the difference in speed is so great). • Ads and other screen dross are yesterday's business—even without ad blockers. • With JavaScript off, privacy comes almost by default. Below, you'll see the test results I've just obtained from EFF's Panopticlick with JS off. Wonderful results aren't they. • This post was done without JavaScript. • The sites that I usually visit are either not heavy with or overloaded with JS scripts. Moreover, the kind of sites I'm interested in contain the types of material that no one cares about if you switch JS off. • If sites don't let me in or screw me around then I'm out of there as fast as I can hit the backspace key. (There's more fish in the internet sea than I can ever visit in multiple lifetimes—so there's no need for me to stick around.) • If you must need to use JavaScript, then this fact alone is already violating your privacy to some extent. I now know the types of sites you will most likely visit and also the kind of data that you're likely to consume or use. I can also make assumptions about you without even going any further. I won't bother pushing the point further, as the cognoscenti who don't use JS already know they're ahead of the game. They also know that trying to get JS fanboys to kick the JS habit makes converting Apple users away from Apple look like child's play. (Who cares? Just let them wallow around in their JS-ridden environment. They're not going to be useful allies in the war on privacy anyway, or they'd already be in a JS-free environment.) EFF's Panopticlick: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Browser Characteristic value User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5 HTTP_ACCEPT Headers application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain; q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 gzip, deflate, br en-US,en;q=0.5 Browser Plugin Details no javascript Time Zone Offset no javascript Time Zone no javascript Screen Size and Color Depth no javascript System Fonts no javascript Are Cookies Enabled? Yes Limited supercookie test no javascript Hash of canvas fingerprint no javascript Hash of WebGL fingerprint no javascript WebGL Vendor & Renderer no javascript DNT Header Enabled? False Language no javascript Platform no javascript Touch Support no javascript Ad Blocker Used no javascript AudioContext fingerprint no javascript CPU Class no javascript Hardware Concurrency no javascript Device Memory (GB no javascript Note: even the User Agent is wrong! The machine I'm using is actually an old Windows 7 laptop. Damn good privacy for just nuking JS I reckon.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  So is the i686 part incorrect also? I was about to say, who is even still on that in 2020
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    No. It's old but it's a decent Win 7 machine, that's why I still use it. My Linux boxes are even more up to date.
- barry27 6y ago
  This is borderline hysterical.
- XCSme 6y ago
  > Blindingly fast speeds The thing is, with JavaScript you can make websites a lot faster than without, but most of JS is not used for "good". For example, it's a lot faster when you click an upvote button to just update the button state/score immediately than to refresh the page.
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    I totally agree, and there's nothing wrong with JavaScript per se. The original purpose of JS made sense. The trouble is that's it's been grossly abused by web sites on two fronts. The first is bloat and the second is privacy. Web pages with multiple megabytes of data per page are just not on in my view but they're commonplace and seemingly getting worse. The second is using JS as spyware. If you look at the table in my post it's clear what I mean, this info should be off limits to remote servers. I've long advocated that we need modified JS engines in browsers that would hand control back to users. For instance, the parameters above could be singlely or collectively turned off or on in setings. Alternatively, the user could set one or more of these parameters to provide the server with spoofed info. If that became popular then web sites would discontinue the process as the data would be useless.
    - zzo38computer 6y ago

perilunar 6y ago

Safari too.

Raed667 6y ago

Turn off JavaScript then navigate to a web app. Act shocked that it doesn't work.

hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
The issue isn't, that Slack doesn'T work. The issue is, that it causes an infinite redirect loop on the slack homepage. (Additionally, I'd argue that while Slack itself may be a webapp, but its homepage is just a landing page, not a webapp)
- zzo38computer 6y ago
  I agree. You may want to just access documentation or something like that, and that shouldn't require scripts to be enabled. Web pages that require scripts should display useful information even if the scripts are disabled; simply "You must enable JavaScript" isn't useful. Links to documentation should be included. If there is a source code repository, a link to it should be included. If it is a display of some data, links to the raw data should be included. If it calculates something, a link to documentation or source code describing the algorithm would be useful (actually, it can be useful even if you are using the web app to calculate it; you might want to know its working). If it is a web interface to other protocols such as IRC or NNTP, or some protocol that works over HTTP(S) such as ActivityPub, the relevant information (protocol, host name, port number, channel, newsgroup, etc) should be mentioned.
- thro1 6y ago
  >.. it causes an infinite redirect loop on the slack homepage. - and on every other page. But with accessibility.blockautorefresh=true and without JavaScript the site is still usable and quite nice. There are few things that could work easily but they don't - as the 'Resources' item in the top bar could be a link as the others - but isn't. Occasionally, on some pages there are items looking [kind of] like links - but clicking on them didn't let me progress further. I can browse through slack app directory, but what I see for every app is only a logo, a name and spinning circle instead of anything else.. Actually.. after looking at the code.. there could be some simple stylish way for fixing most of this stuff - with the Stylish extension: @-moz-document url-prefix("https://slack.com/apps/") { .c-tabs__tab_panel { display:block; } .medium_bottom_margin { display: block !important; visibility: visible !important; } .infinite_spinner { display: none; } } The items looking like links which don't work, I guess, supposed to be 'buttons' in 'application'- what means there is no reference on them to related resources or actions and those are less easy to fix. I don't see really why this site pretends to need JavaScript and tries to enforce it - maybe because of some minor accessibility problems which are attempted to be fixed somehow with bigger accessibility problems, maybe it's needed on some other stages. It happens that the apps pages have most of the necessary information just in place, ready to display, but postpone it to do some network requests and processing of some kind, probably with workers. With JavaScript disabled and provided fixes they show up instantly. :)) That satisfies my use case - be able to evaluate when I could be interested in this platform and to be more in touch with such things, not quite in my focus yet, but which could become important sooner; not being forced much to stuff which I dislike or which break my flow. I mostly can't enjoy JavaScript, being stuck on obsolete browser versions because of Firefox's regression and other browsers not being even close to its earlier abilities. Finally, life is to short to fix random accessibility whatever problems, paying for it with own karma - couldn't we just not unnecessarily force barriers to each others, but gently try to make things easier, as WWW was intended ?

soulchild37 6y ago

Web dev: "you are using web browser wrong"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kordlessagain 6y ago
User: "Stop using my processor for all your stupid stuff."

thro1 6y ago

It's a trap. Dark pattern. It's waiting to use that moment when you switch on the JavaScript for some other tab forgetting about this one, to do some nasty stuff probably. Cloudflare is doing it same way (waits for your mistake, refreshing in the background till JS will be on), but more stealthy - with longer time of refresh. They steal the bandwidth too - and Google was sued recently for eating mobile data. (JavaScript in my browser is not granted for whatever purpose I didn't needed, it's a privilege which only few sites deserve. And I have hundreds of tabs open, because.)

kypro 6y ago
What "nasty stuff" would Slack being doing that's worth the bandwidth / implementation costs of building a redirect loop in the unlikely case, that 1, the user disables JS; and 2, that the user occasionally reenables JS while keeping a non-functional Slack tab open?
- thro1 6y ago
  Spinning my fan, exhausting battery and memory, segregation by compliance.
  - Bjartr 6y ago
    Can you explain this a bit more? What's the value to Slack to do this?
    - thro1 6y ago
      Those are no values but anti-values. If there is no value to Slack (and others) doing this (even so small as outsourcing costs of processing from their servers to my terminal, measuring differences) could they stop doing this ? There is no need for processing (every time).
thro1 6y ago
To downvoters (2+1 down, most of my karma, without comments in last hour): those are facts, not opinion. Now I'm wrong and I'm very happy with this. There was a site witch I'm not using anymore for that reason. When I used searchbox provided, Cloudflare was going in the way: 'Please stand by, while we are checking your browser... Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page.' .. but then after some time it was refreshing anyway and it would catch if I enabled JavaScript for some other reason. It was dark pattern - asking me to reload the page, but then doing it anyway, without my consent, of witch I wasn't aware for a while. I just checked it, and Cloudflare is not doing this (refreshing) anymore. :) I'm quite happy because of this (not wasting resources in some corner case), but in meantime I stopped using that site (they are not aware of it nor of the reason) and found some other, without this kind of obstacles. I wish, Slack could fix it (not me) too.

seattle_spring 6y ago

Want to see something even crazier? Check out slack.com on Internet Explorer 5. It doesn't even load!

dave_sid 6y ago
It works just fine in Netscape Navigator tho.

thro1 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25091823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25091823 Google sued: Idle Android eats mobile data to send telemetry and preload ads I don't have to go to slack.com . But if I go, it will keep eating my mobile data (until I switch the JavaScript on?). Why? (What else?)

thro1 6y ago

For a while worldwide and mutual penalty for it in Firefox ( in addition to blocked scripts ): accessibility.blockautorefresh=true In meantime.. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/contact-sales https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/contact-sales : 'What challenges are you looking to overcome with Slack?' 'I want to evaluate Slack for my organization.' .. but infinite redirects of slack.com website when JavaScript is not on in the web browser make it very difficult.