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> It's about making desktop-class applications more accessible via the web. I am not sure what "web" you're using, but as someone who uses noscript and has bee

> It's about making desktop-class applications more accessible via the web. I am not sure what "web" you're using, but as someone who uses noscript and has been enabling scripts for over a year now, I can firmly say JS is NOT used for making "desktop-class applications more accessible". It's used for ads. And spying. Lots and lots of spying. Seriously. Googletagmanager/analytics is everywhere, it doesn't deserve to be, it doesn't need to be. That domain needs to die a painful, horrible death. facebook, twitter, sessioncam, and many others are used to bloat pages, increase my energy usage, decrease my battery quicker and contribute to the wastage of energy on an unprecedented scale. Just ask yourself, how much money, battery life, bandwidth is spent every year on downloading useless scripts that as far as I can see offer no value whatsoever. By selectively deciding what scripts to enable I get the folliowing result: 1: pages are lighter, less bloated, and STILL WORK 2: I download less scripts, use less battery and save bandwidth and energy for myself and all humanity. 3: There is less spying as fetch() requests are blocked and there can be hundreds of them across a single web-page session (you can watch really bloated pages for 10 minutes, there can be 100's of requests easily). Test: load the following two pages, study their usage, test each with JS enabled/disabled: 1: https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com (with JS:2.69, without: 2.34mb) 2: https://reddit.com https://reddit.com (with JS: 8.58mb, without: 8.10kb, but the page is broken...) Baring in mind old.reddit works fine with JS disabled, showing JS is not needed for a site like reddit to work at all. Yet, "web developers" use them as if it's nothing. Pages that execute over seconds, possibly MB's of data, all the additional requests that are made to enrich the likes of FB/Google et al. So no, SPA are a scam and the web is worse today than I remember back in the 2000's, at least we didn't have cookie pop up boxes because people can't help but abuse JS. Most of the GDPR violations I've found thus far are from scripts that have no place or purpose, that slurp up user data without remorse, that, if disabled, doesn't impact the functionality of the page, and that enables the great surveillance capitalism and data-raping we are seeing today.

cellar_door 6y ago
Ok, so you want to disable tracking and ads. Why does that necessitate disabling all JS? You can enjoy the performance of an SPA while selectively disabling tracking.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  Sadly, it's not often that simple. Giving amazon.com permissions to JS should be enough, but it requires media. or ssl-images to get basic functions to work. Then there's the issue of [randomstring].clouldfront.com - what does this script do? Do I need it? Often finding the right combination of scripts to enable to get one piece of functionality to work makes the whole experience painful and frustrating, often I just forget what I was trying to do and go elsewhere.
betenoire 6y ago
> I can firmly say JS is NOT used for making "desktop-class applications more accessible" yes it is. It is used for ads and spying too, but to say it is "NOT" used for desktop-class apps is wrong
pmlnr 6y ago
I agree with all except for one thing: > at least we didn't have cookie pop up boxes because people can't help but abuse JS pop-up and pop-under banners with IE6 were BAD.
threatofrain 6y ago
Web apps are more accessible because more people can build web apps and thus there are more web apps for people to access. There are still many web apps that aren't accessible because they're too hard, like for example I might say that modern frameworks don't make games easy enough and that's why we've seen far less flash-style games. You don't get to access the games that don't get created.
sofixa 6y ago
> Googletagmanager/analytics is everywhere, it doesn't deserve to be, it doesn't need to be You might not care, but probably most people publishing any sort of content online want to know who visits it ( from where, mobile or web, what numbers, when, etc.). The easiest way to achieve that ( considering there's shared hosting and that most people who care about those numbers aren't the people who installed whatever software runs the site, or developed it. The average website runs wordpress ) is via Google Analytics.

cellar_door 6y ago

Ok, so you want to disable tracking and ads. Why does that necessitate disabling all JS? You can enjoy the performance of an SPA while selectively disabling tracking.

aboringusername 6y ago
Sadly, it's not often that simple. Giving amazon.com permissions to JS should be enough, but it requires media. or ssl-images to get basic functions to work. Then there's the issue of [randomstring].clouldfront.com - what does this script do? Do I need it? Often finding the right combination of scripts to enable to get one piece of functionality to work makes the whole experience painful and frustrating, often I just forget what I was trying to do and go elsewhere.

betenoire 6y ago

> I can firmly say JS is NOT used for making "desktop-class applications more accessible" yes it is. It is used for ads and spying too, but to say it is "NOT" used for desktop-class apps is wrong

pmlnr 6y ago

I agree with all except for one thing: > at least we didn't have cookie pop up boxes because people can't help but abuse JS pop-up and pop-under banners with IE6 were BAD.

threatofrain 6y ago

Web apps are more accessible because more people can build web apps and thus there are more web apps for people to access. There are still many web apps that aren't accessible because they're too hard, like for example I might say that modern frameworks don't make games easy enough and that's why we've seen far less flash-style games. You don't get to access the games that don't get created.

sofixa 6y ago

> Googletagmanager/analytics is everywhere, it doesn't deserve to be, it doesn't need to be You might not care, but probably most people publishing any sort of content online want to know who visits it ( from where, mobile or web, what numbers, when, etc.). The easiest way to achieve that ( considering there's shared hosting and that most people who care about those numbers aren't the people who installed whatever software runs the site, or developed it. The average website runs wordpress ) is via Google Analytics.