I don't understand why there are still people persisting in disabling JavaScript when the vast majority of Web sites today have significant functionality degradation or just plain won't work without it.
> I don't understand why there are still people persisting in disabling JavaScript when the vast majority of Web sites today have significant functionality degradation or just plain won't work without it.
Install NoScript and browse for a couple days. Permanently whitelist what you have to on sites you frequent and trust.
You'll find that pages load light-years faster, browser hangs/crashes are non-existent, annoying advertisements are a thing of the past, and actually, most web sites work fine without Javascript. Even though some of these websites have literally dozens (I suspect sometimes even hundreds: they sometimes chain each other and the full list takes up my entire screen and scrolls for a while) of scripts from different domains.
And then you get used to this web, and all of a sudden there's you run across what should be just a plain-text article - not a web application - and you discover that you have to enable Javascript just to see any text and it feels a little absurd. This is definitely the exception, and not the rule. My whitelist, after years of browsing, is pretty small.
As one of those people, allow me to help you understand.
A lot of websites are much quicker to load with NoScript active in my experience. It's quite an eye opener going somewhere like The Guardian's website, or Salon, and seeing the amount of 3rd party js that loads on every page. If one of those hosts is slow to respond, or down, it can often slow the whole pageload.
I also dislike executing fb, twitter, etc.. widgets all over the place, as well as giving over cpu time to chartbeat, scorecardresearch, and the like.
The tradeoff is that I have to right-click and selectively enable some js from site.com, othersitehost.com and aws-mumbo-jumbo-belonging-to-site.com for some sites that I care enough to read. Sure, the first time I load a site it's more work, but regular sites get necessary js whitelisted.
Personally, I'm happy with this tradeoff - I don't go around recommending it, but it works for me. HTH :)
The vast majority of web sites are crap. I'd really rather default disable javascript and opt-in if I decide I want to allow their code to run on my machine.
This. It's not really about tracking. Most of the websites embed tons of JS for no good reason, just because developers are lazy fashionistas and designers wouldn't be able to justify their pay if they didn't add tons of unneccessary bells and whistles.
There are web applications that need JavaScript, and I'm fine with that. There's lot of cool stuff JS could be used for, and it's not used - check out Bret Victor's explorable explanations. But instead doing something useful with this power, web designers and developers just use JS to make "shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message" - as the quote from a very insightful article goes[0].
Nobody in their right mind is going to practically double the amount of work they do on a project to support people disabling JavaScript (a tiny minority who also knows how to undo this change if they are so inclined) unless they are absolutely huge.
In any case, there are other ways to track you without the use of scripts.
Ironically, if you are reading this thread, you'll find that most people think websites have significant functionality degradation with JavaScript enabled.
This is the new web first world, where everyone is obligated to maintain finely-tuned block lists for various trackers and hostile JavaScript, run adblockers that prefilter sites and click on various odd-looking rectangles to get that plugin to run. The web is a joke.
It's not true that "everyone is obligated" to do those things; people who want to only selectively enable scripts and install extensions to achieve that goal are obligated to.
