Why I'm turning JavaScript off by default

Maybe I should go and look for a typewriter.

I tried this once as well and I might have stuck with it if chrome had a quick "add to js whitelist" button. Instead you have to fiddle around in the settings menu which just takes way too long.

This smells a bit like linkbait to me (and amusingly similar to some of the items in the 4chan parody not so long ago.)

I think this would be better as a blacklist. I definitely don't find as much abuse as is claimed, but it does happen occasionally.

I don't want to return to a world where I have to refresh my email window to receive new email, or a world where collaborative google docs aren't possible or the whole plethora of awesome stuff javascript has enabled - you can't get that useful stuff without it being abusable, that power can be used for good or bad.

I think the delays in loading sites is also overstated, yes on poorly designed sites, but e.g. my home page which is angular-based loads very quickly, and one of the benefit of doing things on the client-side is that you can cache more and only transmit the data the client-side app needs to use, dynamically.

Blacklisting, not whitelist solves this problem, my friend.

>I’m a firm believer that the web should be usable with JavaScript disabled, JavaScript is there to add a layer of interactivity to your web page, not core function. All those people that keep coming up to me quoting ‘but everyone has JavaScript enabled’ miss the point - the web needs to be accessible and JavaScript isn't the answer.

Accessible to who? Because most real life screen readers and such perform quite well in actual tests with JS pages.

>JavaScript is there to add a layer of interactivity to your web page, not core function.

Again, says who? Why should I have to write my web code with twice as much effort, once with all the nice things I can do with JS and another for the 1% of users without Javascript?

Everything about this article reads like it was written in 2011. "elements that aren’t div exist primarily as a nostalgic throwback to a gentler era." Um, have you looked at the HTML5 spec lately? Or used Bootstrap? Or any other significant CSS framework developed in the last 2 years? It's div/span class adornments for structure that's on its way out.

And this, incidentally, is why NoScript is a terrible idea: the web is evolving. As new standards are proposed and targeted, JavaScript polyfills to support new baseline HTML/CSS features are a necessity for sustainable future-and-past-proof development in the modern Web ecosystem. Turning off JavaScript everywhere because you don't like experimentation and want to pretend the world froze in your golden years is narrow-minded and bullheaded.