JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

> But, because it may save bandwidth or help pages load more quickly, a tiny minority of our users (0.1%) choose to keep it off. This might make sense if you are reading static content, but we recommend that you keep Javascript on while signing into your Google Account so we can better protect you.

They don’t seem to explain why though? Did I miss it? Are they fingerprinting the JavaScript environment of my browser? Why? The 0.1% are the people who would like to know why they need it, but this message is written ironically for those who don’t know what JavaScript is.

0.1% of Google's users is still quite a lot of users, is it not? Somewhere over a billion, perhaps, which would mean 1 million+ with JS off.

For about a month or so I tried browsing with JavaScript turned off but gave up after having to modify settings for just about every single site I visited to get pages working, often with them silently failing in the background leaving me wondering what was going on. Sometimes I'd get halfway through a payment transaction before realising that the lack of JavaScript was preventing it from going through and then changing settings and reloading the page would break my session. Long story short, I gave up on this and have succumbed to running JavaScript for all sites again.

Both are editorialized. I think a better, more neutral title would be "Google now requiring JavaScript to be enabled to sign in".

I'm genuinely curious who actually browses the web in 2018 with JS disabled, though. Wouldn't 99.9999% of the web basically break? Like, if you do, do you only stick to a few basic sites, or?