Why I'm turning JavaScript off by default

From the article: "The only person who is significantly injured by turning off JavaScript on my site is me, because it’s needed for the login system and posting UI".

To me this is more sad than the tenure of the article as JS should not be needed to do this at all, I do not need that on my website.

I also disagree with making everything uniform in usage as it brings boredom to the field, for me most exiting times in a field is when the uniformity hasn't kicked in yet, of course my opinion is personal.

I only use NoScript to safe my ass from scams and nasty people trying to encrypt your stuff and extort you for it, and it does it's job well for that.

On my website I mainly use scripting to bring luxury shortcuts for the people logged in, it works without all that for the outside world.

There may be stuff I add to my site that needs scripting. And I may take the scripting out for the login.

The posting UI is just for geolocation which you can't do without JS.

I am much of the same mind as the author, and for a very long time my NoScript was configured to disallow all JS by default.

Sadly things have reached the point where this is just not realistic anymore. Too many websites just fail to work altogether, and I was spending way too much time whitelisting sites. And honestly, who has the time to check up on what each and every one of those is doing with their crappy JavaScript?

Reluctantly I've been forced to enable "Temporarily allow top-level sites by default". This way most sites work somewhat, except when a bunch of their JavaScript is delivered from their CDN - then it all breaks again. At that point I'm usually happy to just bounce from the site, but it is annoying.

In combination with a cookie-eater plugin, I have temporarily found a balance between keeping the web usable (FSV) and eating my own time micro-managing stuff like cookies, permissions and JS, but it's an uneasy truce.

Well, white-listing probably sorts out a big bunch of problematic sites.

My problem aren't pages like facebook or google, which I use everyday (even if facebook is kinda overloaded) but more the pages I don't know :\

> It’s a cargo cult: people do it because everyone else is doing it.

And that's one of the core problems of our society. The seed is planted by commercial interests we cultivate in our culture (the rat race for more money than your peers) and it grows, because we don't choose cooperation (as in "open-source software") over competition.