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Is JavaScript is now evil?
It uses a lot of data, it is a security risk, it is a privacy risk, and it forces you to throw away your old devices.
I've put off learning JavaScript for over 20 years, now I'm not going to be able to search for anything
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There's absolutely no need for JavaScript on a page that has a text input and two buttons and that has worked without JS for three decades. Given Google's reputation for privacy and the constant attempts at selling their users out, it's fair to assume that the reason they're requiring JavaScript is not noble.
Okay. But is it evil?
In contrast, this is less evil: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
But as usual, nobody really cares because it’s also useful and convenient, even if there’s a bunch of ad crap and fingerprinting and tracking and other stuff, basically taking away more and more control over how you want to consume the contents of a site, same as DRM.
Contrast that to a static site (or a server side rendered one to a lesser degree) which is more like a newspaper - if you have it, you can read it, cut out bits that you’re interested in, stash them away for safe keeping etc.
The more nuanced answer is that most technologies aren’t inherently evil or good but it depends on how they’re used. Even then the answer still leans towards “yes”.
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It uses a lot of data, it is a security risk, it is a privacy risk, and it forces you to throw away your old devices.
how much extra data does JS on google use vs without JS? We must be talking about kb that are probably also cached.
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It uses a lot of data, it is a security risk, it is a privacy risk, and it forces you to throw away your old devices.
how much extra data does JS on google use vs without JS? We must be talking about kb that are probably also cached.
Especially when it’s foundational to how the site runs, e.g. the typical way how Vue, React or Angular are used.
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There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan. Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents. Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet ci…
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I simply observed how these threads always go. The faithful turn up to proudly proclaim how much they don't use google, how they cripple their browsing experience so they may remain pure, to experience the internet as it was intended before the original sin (ads) corrupted it.
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There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan. Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents. Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet ci…
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> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I recently discovered how great the ChatGPT web search feature is. Returns live (!) results from the web and usually finds things that Google doesn't - mostly niche searches in natural language that G simply doesn't get. Of course, it uses JavaScript, which doesn't help with the problem discussed here. But I do think that Google is internally seeing a huge drop in usage which is why they're currently running for the…
I've been experimenting with creating single-site browsers[1] for all websites I routinely visit, effectively removing navigational queries from search engines; between that and Claude being able to answer technical questions, it's remarkable how rarely I even use browsers for day-to-day tasks anymore (as in web views with tabs and url bars). We've been using the web (as in documents interconnected with links between…
Surely it would make more sense to use bookmarks?