How many users have JavaScript disabled? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#21

Post by pbiggar » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:12 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #10

marknutter wrote: post #3

That's 2% I could do without, no problem.

Explain that to a potential investor. "We snubbed 2% of our potential user base because we were too lazy to make sure that our site degrades gracefully." From the article, that's _6 million_ of Yahoo!'s 300M+ user base. I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more co…

Try explaining to a potential investor: "We lost the market because we were busy making sure the last 2% of potential customers could use the site".

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#22

Post by code_duck » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:21 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #10

marknutter wrote: post #3

That's 2% I could do without, no problem.

Explain that to a potential investor. "We snubbed 2% of our potential user base because we were too lazy to make sure that our site degrades gracefully." From the article, that's _6 million_ of Yahoo!'s 300M+ user base. I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more co…

2%? Is that supposed to sound significant? I'm sure Yahoo would be doing fine, give or take 6 million users.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#23

Post by kd0amg » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:21 PM UTC

eiji wrote: post #2

The follow-up question is "Why users disable JS?". How many do it unintentional because they think JS is Java(applets ...), or the browser does not support it. I'm also wondering how many people change the advanced JS settings in the browser (do browser other than Firefox even support them?). I'm one of those 2% for different reasons(open for discussion): - it blocks 90% of ads, because most banners are JS driven - I…

I'm one of those 2% for different reasons(open for discussion): - it blocks 90% of ads, because most banners are JS driven ... disabled JS saves bandwidth

These are my usual reasons. I've run into a lot of sites with orders of magnitude more ads, fluff, formatting scripts, etc. than they have content (e.g. thereifixedit and related sites typically take me a full minute to load with JavaScript and often under a second without). I don't make much effort to block ads that don't make the page load much slower.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#24

Post by steveklabnik » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:30 PM UTC

reid wrote: post #17

lukifer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your web page is a simple marketing site, blog, or e-store, then I completely agree. But if your web page is a complex application, having to support no-JS either shuts you out from from a huge set of interface tools, or forces you to maintain two interfaces in tandem. To me, 2% doesn't justify that, particularly when you can just politely inform the user that their browser has a significant feature disabled, and…

Even if your users have JavaScript enabled, they still need to download and run it before using your complex application. Consider GMail. How awesome would it be if you didn't have to wait for its "Loading..." progress bar? It takes 2-4 seconds for that to go away on my computer. If you design for progressive enhancement, you can interact immediately and when JS is ready, it simply enhances what's already there. If d…

> Consider GMail. How awesome would it be if you didn't have to wait for its "Loading..." progress bar?

Well, taking a look at "Basic HTML view"... considerably less awesome.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#25

Post by Locke1689 » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:37 PM UTC

But how many of those 6 million are bots and scripts like mechanize scraping the site?

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#26

Post by techiferous » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:45 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #25

But how many of those 6 million are bots and scripts like mechanize scraping the site?

From the article:

"We took a combination of access logs and beacon data (previously included in the page) and filtered out all of the automated requests, leaving us with a set of requests we could confirm were sent by actual users."

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#27

Post by techiferous » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 10:51 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #10

marknutter wrote: post #3

That's 2% I could do without, no problem.

Explain that to a potential investor. "We snubbed 2% of our potential user base because we were too lazy to make sure that our site degrades gracefully." From the article, that's _6 million_ of Yahoo!'s 300M+ user base. I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more co…

"I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS"

It's worth reminding ourselves that the business and technical constraints of different web applications vary widely and so strategies will also vary widely.

For example, if you are building a greenfield app and your purpose is to try to search for a product/market fit, it generally doesn't make sense to optimize for the 2% of non-js users yet. You haven't yet found a steady source of revenue meaning that (1) you probably can't afford the extra effort and (2) your app's features are likely going to change drastically.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#28

Post by mike-cardwell » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 11:07 PM UTC

If your website relies on JavaScript to work, then you're excluding people who can't use JavaScript. Disabled people with screen readers.

If you don't cater for those people, put some money aside for lawyers.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#29

Post by kalid » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 11:12 PM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #10

marknutter wrote: post #3

That's 2% I could do without, no problem.

Explain that to a potential investor. "We snubbed 2% of our potential user base because we were too lazy to make sure that our site degrades gracefully." From the article, that's _6 million_ of Yahoo!'s 300M+ user base. I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more co…

Tell that to facebook (http://i.imgur.com/9FdJa.png) :-).

The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles (no AJAX, need regular forms for everything), lose dynamic menus (want to duplicate those?), lose a ton of instrumentation you may be doing, etc.

I think it's perfectly fine to say "non-js means you have a read-only experience". Even facebook doesn't go that far -- you can't even log in without js enabled! (And they're definitely in the camp of 2% * 500M).

What will people do who have js disabled? They'll get a tech friend to help, because that disabling was probably a misconfiguration :).

At some point you have to prioritize your time to work on the features that help 95% of your users.

Re: How many users have JavaScript disabled?

#30

Post by mike-cardwell » Wed, Oct 13, 2010, 11:16 PM UTC

I use NoScript mainly due to the prevalence of XSS attacks. If a website doesn't require me to enable javascript, even a trusted website, I wont. All it does is open you up to XSS attacks. Lets not forget that google, facebook, twitter, paypal, hotmail, yahoo and countless other big name websites have all fallen prey to these flaws, and will continue to fall prey to them.