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Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#11

Post by jakecopp »

natbobc wrote: post #4
jakecopp wrote: post #3

Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.

Will need to look at that! I've disabled JS ever since the spectre/meltdown CVE announcement and only enabled it for a select few sites. Now if I hit a SPA site I just close the browser tab unless it's something I really need and want. It's ludicrous how many "doc" and "brochure" sites aren't functional w/out JS enabled.

I agree, it can be ridiculous!

It's also interesting seeing how many tracker domains each site tries to hit, definitely changes your opinion on different sites.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#13

Post by wgerard »

staticelf wrote: post #2

I like that he offers solutions but honestly, more people are vision impaired than have javascript disabled so instead of doing all that work instead put it first on helping people with disabilities. > There is a danger that more and more sites will require JavaScript to render any content at all. What danger, exactly? While some sites that don't require a lot of js is nice you will soon notice that many sites you wa…

> I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread.

Hmmm, I'm not sure about that. I've only done toy projects with WebAssembly, so I could easily be missing something, but it seems to be:

1) Overkill for most websites

2) Significantly more complicated than current web development - which is saying something given the explosion in complexity of recent web development practices

Obviously #2 can be lessened as time goes on, but it's hard for me to imagine #1 ever being false. It's great for performance-sensitive applications like games, but it doesn't seem to offer much benefit for CRUD apps or static sites.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#14

Post by jakecopp »

pkhagah wrote: post #10
jakecopp wrote: post #3

Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.

Same here. In addition, if I think I will visit certain website only once, I open it in private mode and disable umatrix for all domains in the site for a quick view.

I use Firefox containers along with cookie autodelete so each tab gets a clean slate unless I've auto-mapped it to a container (where I've white-listed cookies - eg. a Facebook container where I only visit facebook.com)

Much safer to disable umatrix in the normal tabs then.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#15

Post by wgerard »

everdev wrote: post #8

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels li…

> I always thought it was too bad that browsers choose to show the blank page instead of sending the request and just rendering the difference themselves.

FWIW there are libraries that work around this, e.g. turbolinks - which I heavily suspect Github is using, and is probably a large part of why they're able to support progressive enhancement.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#16

Post by realusername »

everdev wrote: post #8

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels li…

> Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled.

I still do that on my case, a good 95% of the features I develop work without Javascript. One additional benefit is that if your JS crash for any reason, most of the things are still working.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#17

Post by acomjean »

everdev wrote: post #8

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels li…

I thought progressive enhancement.

I think people expect much more interactivity now, (I think google maps was a driver and web based email as well), so it became harder to do pure back end. For example a lot of the queries I run now show a dynamically generated graph. I can do that on the back end, but much easier to use a javascript charting package. I guess I could just use javascript all the way down

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#18

Post by klez »

waldfee wrote: post #6

the 600kb isn't even that bad. it's 2x the amount of requests that makes it so much worse

For perspective that's approx. a quarter of the size of the original DooM. And it's probably minified. And it does little more than fetching info from a couple data sources, formatting and showing it.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#19

Post by Androider »

everdev wrote: post #8

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels li…

It does make development easier, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to support any longer.

If the number of people who visit your site with JavaScript disabled is less than the number of people who visit using the Opera browser, does it really make sense to add [number of supported browsers] x [JS on | JS off] permutations to your testing workload? Is spending the time and resources on creating a non-JS site worth it, or would it better spent somewhere else (usability, accessibility, etc.)? Everything is a trade-off.

I personally feel the JS ship has long sailed. I'm more worried about the recent trend of sites not even working in Firefox anymore, just Chrome. That is definitely a bit sad.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#20

Post by echohack5 »

jakecopp wrote: post #3

Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.

I run uBlock Origin + NoScript. Makes the web run much much faster.
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