141–150 of 373 posts
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I can confirm the "Advanced" button is gone. At least for the moment, the dom.disable_window_move_resize and dom.event.contextmenu.enabled preferences still exist in about:config, though.
This is what will be the major issue for me. I toggle the right click override option on and off on a very regular basis.
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> I simply don't understand why you would want to browse the web without JS enabled It's faster. Much faster. Every time I disable noscript to use some website (90% of the time it's video that doesn't work) I'm always astonished how much GARBAGE most website have. Totally useless stuff. Popup boxes, annoying underlining with mouse overs, certificate verifiers, bookmarks, social network promoters, chat boxes, and help…
But that stuff is all important for the website owner. Advertising for paying the bills, analytics tracking to work out who is using their site, chat/comments boxes for social interaction.
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Non-technical users do not even know what a browser is, much less anything about HTML or JavaScript.
What exactly is a non-technical user? I read threads like this all the time: someone talks about "non-technical users" or "your grandma" or "pointy-haired bosses" or the like, and then goes to great length to discuss, in detail, the capacities or cognitive styles or knowledge base of members of these hypothetical categories. It all seems like a bunch of arbitrary assumptions.
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.
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…
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…
Disabling JavaScript has a few MAJOR disadvantages to proper web usage:
1. As the blog post has said, many web sites will fail in mysterious and unexpected ways. Some web apps may be rendered completely useless. In fact, you might as well just say goodbye to the modern web if you're gonna totally disable JS.
2. Since it's a "blanket fix", disabling JavaScript is a silly way to protect yourself from data miners. Instead, why not use an extension that has been proven to work, is actually available cross-browser, and gives you MUCH finer-grained control over what is displayed?
3. Since JavaScript is not the only thing that could potentially fuck up your web experience, disabling JavaScript doesn't even fix every problem related to privacy! You'd really have to disable JS, disable all plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), and pretty much block yourself out from a lot of the modern web just to be truly secure. At that point, you're really isolating yourself from a lot of the web's rich media, and doing so in spite of the plethora of tools available to combat the stealth data mining practices that these companies use.
Use AdBlock. Use Web Of Trust (WOT). Use Ghostery. At least know when sites are tracking you, and disable those tracking bugs when you see them. You don't need to turn off JavaScript and isolate yourself from an entire ecosystem of awesome, just to maintain control over what data you're sending out about yourself. The idea of turning off JavaScript has always been a silly concept to me, and I felt was simply there to please the more paranoid of us. But there has to be a time to face reality: It just doesn't work.
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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.
The point is that it is relatively trivial for the developer to add automated checks for per-requisites and display warnings for the ones that are missing. It is a lot harder for each user to manually run down through the list of all the things that could go wrong.
If they are missing, tell me your site needs javascript or cookies to operate and I might enable them for your site and give it another shot. But if I just get a catastrophic failure without explanation then I'll probably hit "back" and pick another similar site out of the google search results that brought me there.
Just don't make the warnings into roadblocks. Inform the user and let them decide to proceed or not.
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…
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…
Of course not. Mozilla's agenda is determined by its main sponsor, Google, which has a vital interest for JS to be enabled. Any spin on this being somehow "for the user" is bullshit.
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>> I simply don't understand why you would want to browse the web without JS enabled Security, performance, JS ads ... >> Every single common-use browser on the Internet supports Javascript My company provides a web based app to Fortune 500 banks, around 15% of the browsers we see have JS disabled.
15% of browsers? I don't believe it. This has definitely not been my experience. You must be counting scrapers/bots in this total. Security? The browser sandboxes everything.
Also, browsers aren't bug-free, and enabling Javascript significantly increases the attack surface.
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> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.
I have a crazy idea: a popup with an explanation the first time the user toggles the feature.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-we... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...
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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?