4 ms·

Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the

Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the power to make their websites better, why shouldn't they take advantage of that power?

clarry 12y ago
If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster. I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.
- timothya 12y ago
  Plenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).
  - clarry 12y ago
    People talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources. Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.
pasbesoin 12y ago
I do not find adding another vector for problems, including malicious ones in the face of persistently broken sandboxes, to be "better". If it's a "page" I am going to "read", I don't feel the need to enable arbitrary execution of whatever gets stuffed down the pipe, beyond rendering the more restrictively defined HTML and some hopefully well-debugged -- although even with them problems continue to crop up -- image formats. It's like a biological viral infection. Hygiene can keep it out, but once it's inside, you may have a very persistent and possibly quite debilitating problem. I don't want to be disconnected from the world. Neither, however, do I want to engage in, um... "unprotected casual browsing".
insertnickname 12y ago
It makes me angry because it's unnecessary, adds complexity, and requires me to allow whatever website to execute code on my computer. I don't want that code, I just want to read the page. It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word document that contained scripts that it needed to run to display the document (actually I would be angry if I received any Word document). I don't want 7 tracking scripts, 4 advertisement scripts, jQuery, Angular.js, and whatever other junk modern webdevelopers include on their "websites". I just want the content, and that's what HTML is for. You don't need to include any JavaScript programs to show me formatted text, which is what I visited the page for. I didn't visit to see fancy scrolling effects, to have my every interaction with the document tracked, or to see nothing at all if I don't run foreign programs. I just want the content. Just give me a [motherfucking website](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/).
- TuringTest 12y ago
  It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word document that contained scripts that it needed to run to display the document (actually I would be angry if I received any Word document). That ship has already sailed, Pam. There are two webs now: the document-centric, platform-agnostic, user-controlled presentation of content as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the over-specified development platform that is HTML5, that ultimately originated in Win98's Active Desktop "push technology". The latter has gained world-wide adoption because developers and industries couldn't agree to build a standard software repository that was distributed and allowed independent re-implementations of the running engine. Java tried to be that standard, but didn't have a convenient way to deliver software to end users. App stores later are becoming a close second, but being walled gardens they'll never replace that role in full. It's still useful to think of "the two webs" as different purposes for the HTML5 technology; it's a good question in particular to ask yourself before you start a new website and decide what of the two models you want to support. Requesting that all webs are coded assuming the "web of documents" view is not realistic anymore, though.
- 12y ago

clarry 12y ago

If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster. I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.

timothya 12y ago
Plenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).
- clarry 12y ago
  People talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources. Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.

pasbesoin 12y ago

I do not find adding another vector for problems, including malicious ones in the face of persistently broken sandboxes, to be "better". If it's a "page" I am going to "read", I don't feel the need to enable arbitrary execution of whatever gets stuffed down the pipe, beyond rendering the more restrictively defined HTML and some hopefully well-debugged -- although even with them problems continue to crop up -- image formats. It's like a biological viral infection. Hygiene can keep it out, but once it's inside, you may have a very persistent and possibly quite debilitating problem. I don't want to be disconnected from the world. Neither, however, do I want to engage in, um... "unprotected casual browsing".

insertnickname 12y ago

It makes me angry because it's unnecessary, adds complexity, and requires me to allow whatever website to execute code on my computer. I don't want that code, I just want to read the page. It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word document that contained scripts that it needed to run to display the document (actually I would be angry if I received any Word document). I don't want 7 tracking scripts, 4 advertisement scripts, jQuery, Angular.js, and whatever other junk modern webdevelopers include on their "websites". I just want the content, and that's what HTML is for. You don't need to include any JavaScript programs to show me formatted text, which is what I visited the page for. I didn't visit to see fancy scrolling effects, to have my every interaction with the document tracked, or to see nothing at all if I don't run foreign programs. I just want the content. Just give me a [motherfucking website](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/).

TuringTest 12y ago
It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word document that contained scripts that it needed to run to display the document (actually I would be angry if I received any Word document). That ship has already sailed, Pam. There are two webs now: the document-centric, platform-agnostic, user-controlled presentation of content as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the over-specified development platform that is HTML5, that ultimately originated in Win98's Active Desktop "push technology". The latter has gained world-wide adoption because developers and industries couldn't agree to build a standard software repository that was distributed and allowed independent re-implementations of the running engine. Java tried to be that standard, but didn't have a convenient way to deliver software to end users. App stores later are becoming a close second, but being walled gardens they'll never replace that role in full. It's still useful to think of "the two webs" as different purposes for the HTML5 technology; it's a good question in particular to ask yourself before you start a new website and decide what of the two models you want to support. Requesting that all webs are coded assuming the "web of documents" view is not realistic anymore, though.
12y ago