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The article seems to exist in an imagination of artificial concerns. * Whether the JavaScript is free, as in beer, isn’t something most users care about. * It
by austincheney 6y ago
The article seems to exist in an imagination of artificial concerns.
* Whether the JavaScript is free, as in beer, isn’t something most users care about.
* It isn’t that site owners don’t understand or care. It’s that they want to make money by hoarding analytics from stalking users and everything else is trivial.
The goals of the article aren’t invalid or misplaced though. They just need a slight realignment to match real world concerns.
* Users somewhat care about privacy. Privacy is largely misunderstood and educating users is painful but it’s still more productive than forcing a non-concern.
* Users detest poor performance. Spyware for money is frequently bloated and poorly written swelling bandwidth and CPU usage.
The best solution to this, both technically and from user concerns, is to separate logic from content. If web content were largely without application logic, such as turning off JavaScript, everything gets faster and privacy gets better. If web applications were void of content there are fewer data points to associate and stalk against user concerns. That separation is what GNU should focus upon to achieve their goals of libre JavaScript.
- deepstack 6y agoThanks for the article. I agree this article may be too technical focused. However, with current JS api accessing GPU and many other hardware, I often visit site with JS turned off. It would be good to rewrite or block certain JS APIs. Maybe split JS API to categories. Stuff that change CSS color to be in group, and stuff that access GPU/WebGL and accessing hardware of the computer put that in another group. Seems like browser vendor really ought to think about that, I don't want to enable JS just so it can start accessing all kinds of stuff. But some JS to play with CSS of the page are quite nice to have around.