Create No-JavaScript friendly sites (opens in new tab)

Honestly, that would be a damn good start. Just the other day I took a look at a job posting here on HN. It was nothing more than the company logo and the text of the rec. After JS was enabled, that is. Before that it was just the plain text string "You need JS enabled to run this app." What fucking app, lol?

Think browser fingerprinting, XSS, JS-based analytics, poor or missing CSP + hijacked npm modules, etc.

I generally keep JS disabled as much as possible.

Javascript is unneeded for vast majority of use cases, or is needed as an optional extra (like client side form pre-validation). 99% of existing Javascript on most websites is garbage that actually detracts from user experience; and it tends to grow like cancer - where one could get away with some nice enchantments on an otherwise Javascript-required website, one tends to instead end up with a slow, bloated monstrosity with pointless animations, sliding, etc. that cannot be used in multiple tabs, doesn't have capacity to link to a section of itself, etc. (see Chase banking website, for example)

And that is why I personally think no-JS should simply be an ADA-based legal requirement, like handicapped spots. That would force the usage patterns to move in the right direction.

Perhaps you should just try without JS one day and you might be relieved off a large burden that comes with JS (a lot of security issues, complexity, organizing files and loading, crawling and indexing support). I think the threshold for switching to JS use should be higher than it is currently for all the people who just use it by default.

From my experience, running websites in Germany,

- you can still expect ~20% of desktop users to surf with IE or legacy Edge, and

- the above percentage is higher the older your users are (and lower the younger they are).

Also note that end of support for IE is still 5 years out.

This may be insignificant to you. For others, IE support is essential.

I also work in the healthcare space with heavy HIPAA security requirements. Like any language/framework/platform there are best practices to follow for solid security and performance, and a good secops team should set meaningful requirements.

In short, I will show a "This site requires Javascript enabled" message 100% of the time if my site requires Javascript.

"I won't put in extra work to make my sites work in IE, I also will not put in extra work to make my sites work for (a vanishingly small number of) people who pre-emptively block one of the most powerful tools in my belt."

Well, I'm glad to be one of that vanishingly small number who still has the wherewithal to block one of your most powerful tools—as we've damn good reasons to do so.

I could be as rude and as arrogant as you have been and just state my piece then leave—which is that things were absolutely fine with the internet until @#$%^&!)s like you came along and &^$%&* it up with JavaScript—but I'll actually proceed on and give you a few very good justifications as to why JS stinks! I know I won't change your mind but hopefully a few others may take cognizance from this summary.

First, it's not JavaScript per se that's the problem, rather it's you web developers who are at the heart of the trouble. The fact is you don't know how to or won't use JavaScript responsibly. Tragically, putting JavaScript into your mob's hands is about as irresponsible as giving kids a loaded 105mm howitzer to play with.

Let's begin (this is the short list):

1. Technology to do everything that most visitors to websites wanted to do was already in existence before JavaScript came along. Back then, the only things that we users had to content with were irritating animated GIFs and 'sparkling' text and the like but they pale into insignificance compared with the problems that JavaScript has brought for us users.

2. JavaScript slows the rendering of many website pages down to an absolute crawl. Moreover, I'm not talking about a minor degradation in page-rendering speed either, in fact it's an enormous reduction, so much so that it's hard to believe (unless you're one of the sans-JavaScript cognoscenti who's already applied the 'secret' of turning JS off). …And it is a secret you developers wish to keep too; for obvious reasons it's not a topic you JS devotees want aired in public (discussions such as this are rarely debated in the tech press and when they are they're kiboshed at the first opportunity).

3. JavaScript introduces irritating time transitions into the time it takes for web pages to render. Frankly, these jerky effects and 'noisy-like' delays irritate the hell out of many of us users. Of course, you developers probably don't even notice them as you've the latest-and-greatest high speed hardware which (often) reduces them to a tolerable level—and even if you did you wouldn't care anyway as JS serves a much too an important role for you web-side developers to bother eliminating the problem. Anyway, we users have a solution—just switch off JavaScript and voilà the problem instantly vanishes.

4. Nuking JavaScript stops—kills stone dead—the vast majority of painfully irritating ads, popups begging for subscription as well as all those other annoying and unnecessary animated visual effects that so often fills web pages. Not only are they distracting but also they clutter pages and obscure text. Again, our solutions is to turn off JavaScript and we're now back in control—not the website. You don't even need to install sophisticated script blockers, NoScript etc. (it's a no-brainer really).

4.1 If you're worried that you might have to turn on JS in a hurry and the settings aren't available or immediately accessible then just install a Toggle JavaScript add-on into your browser. It will install a button on the browser's Navigation Bar that allows you to toggle JS on and off (nothing could be simpler). (Incidentally, it hasn't gone unnoticed that you website developers have managed get browser developers to remove the JS on/off setting in the setup/preferences menu of some browsers, for example, Firefox.)

5. Another huge gripe among many users is the obnoxious practice of websites stopping users back-linking to the previous page as sites deliberately break or expire the page immediately the user moves forward—and they often do so without any good reason (i.e.: when there's no real need for security). Even 'good' sites such as DuckDuckGo are into this damned annoying caper. If that were not enough, we see websites regularly abusing—deliberately punishing—users who refuse to use JavaScript by rendering the visited page blank unless JavaScript is turned on. Then there's the annoying practice of websites using overlays to force users to do the website's bidding. This is nothing other than abuse of the user by the website—it's a case of 'we'll fuck you up properly unless you do exactly what we damn-well tell you to do!' You developers really do have a damned hide and what makes it much worse is that you actually get indignant because some users "...pre-emptively block one of the most powerful tools in your belt". With an attitude like that then fuck you!

5.1 What is it about you power-hungry control freaks that make you so nasty and antisocial? Have you ever heard of the science of ergonomics or even diplomacy? Perhaps Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, should be a part of the JavaScript syllabus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

6. When I first started to use the internet a page of text was 2k bytes in size; nowadays, it's usual to see web pages blow out to between 1MB and 5MB which is just outrageous. Turning off JavaScript can prevent some of this traffic downloading. This not only speeds up web page rendering but also saves your line/data costs. (Remember the user is the one paying for the data costs—not you! It would be interesting if governments were to tax websites if pages exceeded a certain size—after all, large web pages are unnecessarily contributing to greenhouse gasses. Methinks a carbon tax on excessively sized web pages would be a brilliant idea!)

7. Without JavaScript, cryptominers find it more difficult to use your machine's CPU time for calculations; similarly, identity theft is more difficult so is the ability to take over your machine or put dangerous payloads on it. Moreover, even figuring out your time zone and location becomes more problematic for the remote website if JS is disabled. This all helps to maintain privacy.

8. Without JavaScript most invasive trackers are blocked, so are many of the privacy-invading techniques used by websites. Without JS, websites can't even stocktake users' font lists let alone use many of their nefarious tricks to spy on them. To get some idea how effective turning JS off is, visit EFF's Panopticlick website, https://panopticlick.eff.org/, then toggle JS on and off. Nuking JavaScript isn't a universal panacea for privacy nor will it completely stop browser fingerprinting but it's a damn good start! Here's the results of Panopticlick's test on my browser sans JS. You'll note that without JS switched on, 18 pieces of private information were blocked from this nosey test site.

Screen Size and Color Depth — no javascript,

System Fonts — no javascript,

Limited supercookie test — no javascript,

Hash of canvas fingerprint — no javascript,

Hash of WebGL fingerprint — no javascript,

WebGL Vendor & Renderer — no javascript,

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.

9. Not satisfied with all that lot, you mob want even tighter coupling into the innards of our machines, to do that you've even 'conned' the W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, and IETF, Internet Engineering Task Force, to adopt new technologies such as WebRTC. These technologies further obfuscate what websites are doing on users' machines.

It's precious little wonder you website developers are so enamored with JavaScript. You've never stated the real reasons why JavaScript is so essential to your existence, it's been your dirty little secret for many years and it's time we users spelt it out in spades. At no time were we users ever consulted about JavaScript's invasive features nor were we ever told in advance that you were going to steal our privacy and to do so you'd use JS as your frontline tool.

Finally you need to recognize that many of us just DO NOT want fancy wanky web pages! When I read a book I'm not distracted by subscription notes popping up out of the page and I don't expect it to happen when I'm visiting a website! Just because the technology allows it, it doesn't mean that it should be used or abused. (I note you're not alone here, TV and video editors are forever fast-cutting or using damned annoying distracting visual effects.). If you feel that you must cater to the attention-deficit generation who needs baubles bangles and beads bobbing around every second then produce two threads to your websites. The fact is that most of you developers have fuck-all knowledge of user ergonomics or how the human mind actually absorbs knowledge. As a starting point I'd strongly suggest that you at least have the decency to recognize your limitations.

It has to be said that we users are at war with you and your websites—a war that you started and that up until now one in which you have held the advantage. These days, with privacy being on everyone's lips, I can only hope that eventually things will turn in users' favor. You web developers have so maimed, distorted and damaged the internet over the last 20 or so years it seems to me that eventually the scope of your work and how you carry it out will—of necessity—have to be legislated. It only takes one country to introduce laws and regulations and the dominoes will soon fall. The sooner it happens the better.

Most devs need to stop taking the crap tools they're forced to use at their paid job and using them for their personal websites.

"I should clarify, I'm only moaning about JS used where it need not be, in the display of text and pictures. Essentially, stativc web pages. There are guys on this thread who are trying to make apps work withou JS and I'm getting uneasy about that - that level of functionality should, and perhaps must, be done client-side or the excess bandwidth and server-side load will become unmanageable. I would still not enable JS to allow those, but I can see why others would."

Trying to allow for extremists like myself, well, you may be doing too much in this particular type of case. Just giving me sensible static websites is fine, I'm not asking for more.

That’s why ublock origin and friends are so popular.

Precisely. That's exactly what you get by disabling javascript on most sites.

Two of the fastest sites that I know are sourcehut and the D-language forums. They are much snappier than any javascript-infested site.

However, I am always amazed how lazy devs are when it comes to purely informational sites as there should be no need to require javascript. Sure, it might help with certain cosmetics but the people who disable javascript rarely care about cosmetics (it is nice, sure, but if you cannot view the site without enabling a bunch of untrusted code to run on you computer then I really must want to visit it to enable it and reload the page).

Hackernews, LWN, arstechnica are all sites that works really well without javascript enabled (ars needs it for comments, but I rarely comment so if I want to I can enable then). Reddit and many more sites somewhat needs to it but you can usually see the interesting bits without it, so if you are invested or a common visitor it is easy to enable the few needed.

If you are directing your content towards the technical community, my advise would be to definitely test it without Javascript, preferably in a text only browser also. It does not need to look super pretty in these modes, but it should work. This is probably also a good foundation to provide the content to groups that uses accessibility software (think blind), but I do not know how well those tools handle JavaScript-dependant content.

The problem is that browsers are running apps when most users just want to read relatively static content. Our ever decreasing, day-one battery lives and swelling landfills are clear evidence this isn't sustainable.

There is almost never any new insight, and you could copy+paste comments from one to the next and not know the difference.

We get it, Javascript is the worst and everything should run perfectly without it - at least to the vocal minority of users who actually care (which is basically just HN's demographic).