Years ago I was on the "people who block JavaScript are crazy" bandwagon, until just loading a single news article online meant waiting for a dozen ads and autoplaying videos to load. I spent more time waiting for things to finish loading than I spent browsing the actual sites, which killed my battery life. I'd get a couple of hours of battery life with JS on, and with it off, I could work all day on a single charge. It was nice.

Ever since then, I've been using NoScript without a problem. I've spent all of maybe 5 minutes, cumulative over the course of several years, clicking a single button to add domains to the whitelist. If whitelisting isn't something you want to do, you can use NoScript's blacklist mode, too.

> I'm now so spoilt by the advantages of the non-JS world that I don't think I could ever return. I'm always acutely reminded of the fact whenever I use someone else's machine.

I relate with this 100%.

That sounds like you not only didn’t block JS, you also didn’t block ads. Which is a very different argument. I only block 3rd-party JS by default (and that already requires a lot of whitelisting for almost every site that has any interaction) and I don’t have those issues because I also block ads.

If you are heavy user of Google's services, Twitter and Facebook as well as many big news outlets and heavy-duty commercial sites then you're the 'JavaScript' type and stopping scripts is definitely not for you!

If you are like me and don't have any Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts and deliberately avoid large commercial sites like, say, Microsoft then you can happily switch off JavaScript and experience the 'better' web.

You know the type of person you are, so with this fact in mind there's no point me proselytizing the case for disabling JavaScript.

It's not compulsory, especially governments. I never deal with government on the web at a personal level. If they expect me to fill in forms I simply say that I do not have the web and would they please send me a paper copy - which they're obliged to do at law - same goes for the census.

If the government expects me to do business with it on the internet then it will have to legislate to make it compulsory AND then provide me with the necessary dedicated hardware for said purpose.

Why would I act this way? Well, for quite some years I was the IT manager for a government department and I know how they work (or I should say don't work).

BTW, as IT manager I never used email within the department (perfunctorily emails sent to my office were received by secretarial staff). If the CEO wanted to send me an important memorandum then he had to have it typed up on paper and personally sign it (and I would reciprocate the same). When in government you quickly realize that atoms on paper and especially a written signature is real guaranteed worth - unlike ephemeral emails that can vanish without trace.

I'm forever amazed at the trust the average person has in these vulnerability-ridden flaky systems.

I, unfortunately, use some of these services and similar ones, too, and it takes a few seconds to enable JS on them, and then the sites will work indefinitely afterwards.

I hear you, but I wonder if you are being honest with yourself when you use the word need.

At this point, I view Google and Facebook as the equivalent of loan sharks. A loan shark does provide a service, but most people shouldn't use one.

Seems like clear case of "crossing the river to collect water" (as the Swedish saying says)? This is what I use uBlock Origin (with the right blocklists) for and it happens automagically. I did use uMatrix for quite a awhile, but eventually ended up ditching it because uBlock Origin worked so well.

Over time I have noticed a strong correlation between sites which don't work right without JS and low-quality content which I regret having spent time reading.

Most of the time I encounter one of these sites I now just close the tab and move on with a clear conscience.

Absolutely true, I can't agree with you more. I've reached the stage where if I land on a site and its main content is blocked if JavaScript is disabled then my conditioned reflex kicks in and I'm off the site within milliseconds.

Rarely is this a problem with sites that I frequent (and I too don't have time to waste reading low quality content).

There are stacks and stacks of them here on HN that are of excellent quality - I use HN as my 'quality' filter (and I reckon I'm not alone).

Moreover, if one doesn't run JS like me then it's dead easy to avoid problematic sites as HN lists them (Twitter, etc. - and it doesn't take long to get to know the main offenders, thus avoid them).

:-)

BTW, I agree with you it is hard to find good sites these days but eventually most really good sites appear here on HN. Do what I do, when you come across them bookmark them.

OK, here's the scenario: I log on to HN with JavaScript disabled, do all the things I do, read articles, submit posts all without JS. At some point I want to search HN so I hit the 'toggle JS' button on my browser, it then goes from red to green to tell me JS is now active. I then refresh the page and start searching HN. When I've finished I hit the JS toggle and the button goes back to red - JS is now kaput.

I really can't think of anything simpler - JS is off until I really need it and when I do it's immediately available without digging deep down into menus etc.

I'd add HN uses JS as it was originally intended and does so responsibly. I have nothing against JS per se, the problem comes from websites that abuse webpages and thus the user by sending megabytes of JS gumph and so on.

Running without JS and only turning it on when really necessary I reckon is a reasonable compromise.

Lucky for me, I can toggle on JavaScript for them individually and continue with my general policy.

Unpopular opinion: I never click on twitter links anymore. It’s almost never worth it.

IMHO, 140/280/N character limits are a way to cheapen discourse. I think there is something to be said for the “density” of text: text that offers very little to think about (less dense) is vacuous but encouraged by a character limit; yet, text that is compressed into a character limit either packs too much info into a short space that requires more discourse to properly get a thought across or elides too much from the text, making it less accurate/meaningful/important. Or worse: people chain posts into long 1/907, 2/907, 3/907… trains that should be blog posts rather than requiring some other application to string the thread together.

Of course the other reason (more central to this discussion) never to click on a twitter link is that JS and an account login is required now to read the posts past a certain point. If that makes me an old man yelling at a cloud, so be it, but aren’t there better ways to handle online public discourse without sacrificing people’s privacy and security?

It's not unpopular with me, I agree with you completely. I was never a Twitter fan but when they forced the use of JS that was the end of it (you'll note I used Twitter as an example in one of my earlier posts).

You're right about sacrificing people’s privacy and security, as I said in another post 'I'm forever amazed at the trust the average person has in these vulnerability-ridden flaky systems'.

Also - Firefox on mobile supports NoScript!

[1] NoScript is harmful and promotes malware - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12624000

The developer issued an apology and reverted the change, and apart from a Ghostery one (who are also shady) no further controversies are documented at [1]. Perhaps the Wikipedia article is incomplete, given the one linked is from 2016?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript

profootballtalk.com works great if you don't want to vote or comment

macrumors.com great functionality

nitter.net happily takes the place of twitter.com

drudgereport.com works great and I rarely turn on JS when I go to the sites he links to, usually the text on target sites is there if not as pretty as it could be

individual subreddits (e.g. old.reddit.com/r/Portland/ ) are quite good w/o JS. But the "old." is probably important.

I admit that there are lots of sites that don't work, e.g. /r/IdiotsInCars/ doesn't work because reddit uses JS for video. For so many sites the text is there but images and videos aren't. Also need to turn off "page style" for some recalcitrant sites.

In conclusion, contrary to your JS experience, I'd say that I spend over 90% of my time browsing w/o JS and am happy with my experience. Things are lightning fast and I see few or no ads. I don't need an ad blocker since 99% of ads just don't happen w/o JS.

Well, you still have lots of tracking stuff loaded probably, unless you got something extra for blocking trackers. A tracking pixels does not need JS. A font loading from CSS does not need JS. Personally I dislike those too, so I would still recommend using a blocker for those.

Yes I'm sure I have that stuff loaded. But I don't care because it's quite ephemeral:

I exit Firefox multiple times a day, there's really no performance cost to doing that after every group of websites. E.g. if, while reading HN, I look up something on Wikipedia, or I search with Bing or Google, everything goes away together.

In my settings: delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed

In my settings: clear history when Firefox closes, everything goes except browsing and download history

No suggestions except for bookmarks.

So when I restart Firefox to then browse reddit it starts with a clean slate.

Comcast insisted I purchase a DOCSIS3 modem quite a while ago. Once downloads are at 100 mpbs+, does it really matter if I repeatedly re-download a few items to cache?

The only noticeable downside is when I switch to Safari to view something that needs JS, I then see ads for clothing that my wife and daughters might be interested in. I presume this is due to fallback to tracking via IP address. Of course I always clear history and empty caches in Safari.

Obviously this doesn't work for someone who wants to or needs to keep 100 browser windows open at once, for months at a time. But that's not me. I don't think that way, never have.

Edit: just had to add that sites like Wikipedia are better w/o JS (unless you edit?). I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?

Caught me. Tab hoarder here : )

> I don't see those annoying week-long pleas for money. Do they still do those?

They still do those. At least I have seen them less than a year ago.

The 3-5% of sites I'm referring to are ones where I have to enable JS to view them. In by far the vast majority of the sites that I frequent I do not have to enable JS to view them.

Also note my reply to forgotmypw17, one doesn't need JS if one avoids low quality dross.

If the 3-5% of the website you use will start tracking via server-side GTM with the site's domain, you will not be able to simply use noscript to disable tracking ?

It remains to be seen how Google's Tag Manager actually works and I'd be surprised if data from your machine is ignored altogether. If your machine says nothing about you then Google won't know who you are - unless you have a fixed IP address and most ordinary users don't. Sure there's browser fingerprinting (but I never bother about this as I use multiple browsers on multiple machines which screws things up a bit).

When I used to worry about this more than I do now, I used to send my modem/router an automatic reboot signal during periods of inactivity, this ensured a regular change of IP address.

OK, so what info can be gotten from your machine if JavaScript is disabled? Some but it's nothing like what happens when JS is active - in fact the difference is quite staggering (ages ago I actually listed the differences on HN).

Presumably you could search for the post but there's an easier way. Use the EFF's test your browser site https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and do the test with and without JS. Note specifically the parameters with the 'no JavaScript' message.

Also note the stuff a website can determine about you even when JS is disabled - with this info you can start tackling the problem such as randomizing your browser's user agent, etc.

My aim was never to kill evey bit of tracking, rather it was to render tracking ineffective and I've been very successful at doing that. The fact is I don't get ads let alone targeted ones just by turning off JS and having an ad blocker as backup. The only other precaution I take is to always nuke third-party cookies and to kill all standard cookies when the browser closes.

I'm not too worried about Google's Tag Manager, for even if Google tracks me it still has to deliver the ads and it cannot do so with JS disabled and an ad-blocker in place.

__

Edit: if you want to watch YouTube then Google insists you enable JavaScript. This is bit of a pain but it's easily solved with say the Android app NewPipe (available via F-Droid). NewPipe also has the added advantage of bypassing the ads and having the facility to download clips as well if that's your wont.

Of course, there are similar apps for desktops too.

I think I can still load NewPipe through usb debugging but not able to have auto updates

I'm the exact opposite. I root my Android machines and remove every trace of Google's crappy gumph, Gmail etc. (I don't even have a current Google account.)

I occasionally use the Google playstore but I log on anonymously with the Aurora Store app (not available on the playstore).

I say occasionally because that's true, instead I use F-Droid or Aurora Droid to get my guaranteed spyware free apps. It's a different world - I'm the antithesis of the happy Google user.

Don't try to load NewPipe, in your case it's just not worth the effort (and Google will notice the fact).

You can play with page load sizes in the debugger console with stuff blocked and without too - about half the downloaded material on any major news website is stuff that Ghostery will block. It's quite terrifying.

since we are talking about the future I'd like to point out that they can always serve ads from the origin domain without javascript.

I mean the anti-adblock battle will evolve until each page we visit is a single image file that we have to OCR to remove ads. then we will need AI, and they will have captchas that will ask which breakfast cereal is the best.

you can stay ahead of the curve but it's always moving forward.

But most of them don't. Yes, they can change their model and in time they likely will.

As it stands now, one doesn't have to watch ads on the internet if one doesn't want to - all it takes is a little perseverance and they're gone. If one can't rise to the occasion then one has a high tolerance for ads.

Even YouTube can be viewed without ads with packages such as NewPipe and similar.

You're right about AI, OCR etc. and I think in time it will come to that.

It seems to me people like us will always be ahead because we've the motivation to rid ourselves of ads. It reminds me of the senseless copyright debate - if I can see the image then I can copy it. No amount of hardware protection can stop me substituting a camera for my eyes. What's more, as the fidelity goes up HD, 4k etc. the better the optical transfer will be (less comparative fidelity loss).

That said, the oldest technology - standard TV - is still the hardest to remove ads from. Yes, one can record a program and race though the ads later (which most of us are very adept at doing) but it's still inconvenient.

What I want is a PVR/STB that figures out the ads and bypasses them. Say I want to watch TV from 7 to 11pm (4 hours) and there's a total of one hour of ads and other breaks in that time that I don't want to watch then I want my AI-aware PVR/STB to suggest that I start watching at 8pm instead of 7 as this will allow it to progressively remove ads on-the-fly across the evening.

The person who makes one of these devices will make a fortune. If the industry tries to ban it (as it will) then we resort to a software version and download it into the hardware. Sooner or later it's bound happen and I'll be an early adopter.

I wonder if something like sponsorblock for youtube (which is a must have) could be done for TV? it's a crowsourced effort and works flawlessly for popular channels.