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"Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#131

Post by nightski »

ubernostrum wrote: post #127
Gormo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any empirical evidence that suggests that people accidentally disabling JavaScript and then being confused as to why websites don't look right is a significant problem? The author of that article says: "Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall? — obvious spoiler alert: The answer is no." The answer is yes . If 2% of users have a purpose for it, perhaps it woul…

"Advanced settings" dialogs tend to indicate poorly-thought-out interface design. Rather than demonstrating careful attention to what features are useful and important enough to ship, they become dumping grounds for "something someone asked for once".

So well thought out interface design is ignoring subsets of users and unifying everyone to one common set of behavior.

Imagine if Excel employed this philosophy. It wouldn't be useful to anyone.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#132

Post by jwarkentin »

gavinpc wrote: post #71
gkoberger wrote: post #22

Here's a very relevant blog post by Alex Limi of Mozilla: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ Most sites these days that aren’t just displaying content will fail in interesting & mysterious ways if you don’t have JavaScript enabled. For the general population, Firefox will appear broken. And yes, I know that some people have reasons (privacy, web development) to turn off JavaScript. There are many add-ons that can…

Try disabling cookies. This exactly describes the effect, except that it's not mysterious once you're used to it. If something doesn't work, I open it in Chrome (where I have cookies enabled), and it works. In many cases, I suppose the developer doesn't know about the cookie dependency (because of a framework or some other dependency). In other cases, I guess they don't care. Rarely does the page actually tell you th…

Frankly, I don't notify users in any way of a dependency on cookies or JavaScript. If you go disabling features fundamental to the functionality of the web, I expect that you know what you're doing and don't, in fact, expect most of the web to work. The web apps I build simply aren't going to function if you disable JavaScript or cookies.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#133

Post by reeses »

betterunix wrote: post #84
slaxman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be that works for you. But a significant number of web developers are moving on JS frameworks for web development such Angular, Meteor, Node, etc. Most sites built on these frameworks will break is javascript is disabled. As an end user, that is the worst user experience you can ask for.

"Most sites built on these frameworks will break is javascript is disabled" You know, there is a solution: the noscript tag. You know, the tag that lets you retain some level of functionality for people who do not have Javascript enabled. Why should I have to expose myself to various security and privacy problems just because some web development framework cannot keep an old version working ? There are a lot of reaso…

"Should vision-impaired users who use TTS systems be shut off because your framework of choice thought that Javascript should be used to replace functionality that is built into the browser?"

Unfortunately, that's about the scope of options most organizations entertain. If there's any degradation, it tends to lack grace and is on a par with a screenreader.

While I "like" javascript (OK, I like dynamic sites), if my machine seems slow, a cursory look at my running process will show a chrome or safari process that is inevitably getting dry humped by a page using js for a carousel or something equally banal.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#134

Post by jwarkentin »

kijin wrote: post #40

I supppose too many people accidentally disabled Javascript in recent months while trying to disable Java. As long as there's an about:config option that does the same thing, I don't think it's a bad move to remove that option from view. I will, however, miss the "Advanced" button next to the "Enable JavaScript" checkbox (if that button is going to go away, too, which the article isn't clear about). I use those Advan…

You know in Firefox you can hold shift and right click and it will bypass any event handlers on the website. It will just give you your FF context menu.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#135

Post by reeses »

dotmanish wrote: post #118
gnosis wrote: post #47

A few months ago, I switched to using w3m inside emacs as my primary browser. w3m is not capable of handling Javascript at all. And you know what, for 90% of the websites I visit, it doesn't matter. They function fine and look fine without Javascript. And if w3m could manage to make most websites look fine without Javascript, so could Firefox -- if its developers cared. As for non-technical users -- they're probably…

" As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff to see what it does. " You would be surprised what non-geeks tend to do when they have no clue what to do.

My mother-in-law emailed my wife a one line message today asking why she's seeing ads on Facebook that she hadn't seen before.

You are on the mark.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#136

Post by ubernostrum »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #59

Okay, since Opera seems to have gone the way of the dodo: Is there a browser for power users? I mean, good luck to Firefox and Chrome, but considering I rarely use flashy websites, I really would rather use something that only works with half the sites, but has the experimentation and hunger for ideas for the sake of ideas more than for the sake of market share these so sorely lack.

Sure, there's a browser for power users. It's called being enough of a power user to install extensions that do what you want.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#137

Post by piyush_soni »

ubernostrum wrote: post #127
Gormo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any empirical evidence that suggests that people accidentally disabling JavaScript and then being confused as to why websites don't look right is a significant problem? The author of that article says: "Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall? — obvious spoiler alert: The answer is no." The answer is yes . If 2% of users have a purpose for it, perhaps it woul…

"Advanced settings" dialogs tend to indicate poorly-thought-out interface design. Rather than demonstrating careful attention to what features are useful and important enough to ship, they become dumping grounds for "something someone asked for once".

What makes you say "Advanced settings" dialogs mean poorly thought out UI? I think it's a very good way to tell novice users, "don't open this panel if you don't know what you are doing". And if they still do it and something wrong happens, they'd immediately know the reason.

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#138

Post by foobarbazqux »

gnosis wrote: post #63
camus wrote: post #53

I exclusively surf with javascript disabled by default. I only turn javascript on on websites that i trust or the site has to give a good reason to do so. i wont turn on javascript to display your crappy jquery menu or slideshow. So many pages are totally broken without javascript. You dont need javascript to have a good layout, a complexe menu or display images. Yet some "professional" sites dont even work without j…

Javascript, Flash, HTML 5, and virtually all the rest of the HTML "enhancements" are a cancer on the web. Honestly, the only website that I can think of where using Javascript actually does something useful that I'd have a hard time doing better on a standalone app on my own machine is Google Maps, where it's nice to be able to scroll around by dragging the map with the mouse. But even there, I'd gladly sacrifice tha…

Youtube needs either Flash or HTML5, do you think it's worthless?

Re: "Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23

#139

Post by logn »

nhamann wrote: post #89
logn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.

I don't know how extensive Unicode math symbols are, but it's unclear to me how you would display things like matrices and do alignment of multiline equations.

I'm not sure either. But I know that you can do crazy things with unicode, and I'd bet that if you treated treated unicode as a sort of low-level compile-to target you could then design a high-level language from which to write math text. I'm not sure of the practical benefit and maybe this would be even more inaccessible to people... but still, I think JS is great, but wouldn't pure HTML and encodings be even cooler?

Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏

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