As time has gone on, more and more folks recommend disabling JavaScript as the default behavior and opting in on a per-site basis. This is easy to do with uBlock Origin. This isn’t a broken browser behavior but a conscious decision for the security and privacy of many users. Leaving one or two sentences isn’t much, and the “sales pitch” will help with SEO for web crawlers that don’t execute scripts.
Nope. You can see it in Brave search results. It’s also a massive barrier for a small start-up to index the web if it has to expend resourses to download and execute JavaScript. More generally, there’s also web scrapers (the good kind), TUI browsers, old hardware that shouldn’t be obsolesced just because of “browser target = current browsers only” (with this being more important for informational type websites rather than web applications which could just have a small blurb about what the site is/does tagged with its “Enable JS for X-App”).
IE7 was the oldest version I ever had to support--I understand it being a pain and there is always a cut-off point. This said, not JavaScript is often an option too for entire categories of the web ...and I say this as someone whose career has mostly been built on CSS & JavaScript. There’s a lot of old machines that should and could be able to read the sites we have today if wasn’t for that pesky scripting language being used where it didn’t need to (looking at you blogs and news sites that blocked your image loading behind JavaScript even though native loading="lazy" exists and would be a progressive enhancement).
