Highly recommend browsing while keeping the js on your browser disabled. I know it's impractical for pretty much most web users, but you can eliminate 95% of the annoyance of the modern web in one whole swoop with just this one option.
- WordPress: "WordPress is actually very noscript-friendly"
- Amazon: "At first glance, Amazon does a cracking job with its non-JavaScript solution...On closer inspection, quite a few things were a bit broken"
- Google Calendar: "I was disappointed that there wasn’t a noscript fallback"
- Facebook: "flat-out refuses to load without JavaScript, but it does offer a fallback option... a site which offers a separate version of its content for noscript or feature phone users."
- LinkedIn: "LinkedIn...never loads, so all I could do was stare at the logo."
- Instragram: "Instagram gave me literally nothing. A blank page."
- GitHub: "GitHub looks almost exactly the same as its JavaScript-enabled counterpart."
Note: some of these sites may have changed (improved?) since 2018.
I guess it depends on the annoyance? I use NoScript, and it's true that sites load a lot faster. Because an empty page that reads "You must enable JavaScript to view this app" would qualify as a very small payload by almost any standard.
I use noscript too. I try to avoid such websites as much as possible, because they obviously don't want me browsing their website. We need to apply pressure on webmins so they make sure the experience stays good with JS disabled.
Can you blame them for not wanting you to browse their website? Using noscript is probably a pretty decent litmus test for non- or anti-consumerist values, which, in turn, implies being a low-value audience for advertising. Why waste any more bandwidth and server resources than you have to on someone who would be, best case scenario, negatively profitable?
Third party Javascript is the problem, and adblockers take care of that. Turning off JS entirely often blocks content on sites, be it images or something else.
Third-party JS isn't behind sites that perform so badly they make the whole system slow down even when you're not on the page, or eat memory like it's free. Both those things can happen on sites that aren't "apps" at all, or that don't need to be as huge and wasteful as they are to achieve the same levels of "app-ness" that they have (gmail is a notable offender in the latter category, but it's far from the only one). Those problems are largely due to really bad judgement, in first-party code, about where (and whether) to attach Javascript event listeners, terrible use of timers, and all manner of programmer-productivity-and-QOL enhancements that invariably (it seems) manifest as much higher end-user memory use and lots of bad (for performance) memory access patterns.
See also: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-...