[Joeri]

I don't know a single person IRL who turns off javascript. It's the browsing equivalent of running only RMS-approved software, possible in theory, but not very practical, and definitely rare. The business needs of modern commercial websites are hard to build with progressive enhancement, and web apps basically require javascript to deliver a good user experience. Yes, you can build a personal website using progressive enhancement, and at one point I did, but I had to give up my progressive enhancement ways when i became a professional web dev because it was just not practical to do otherwise.

[TeMPOraL]

Web apps can be excused, but most web sites? Not really. What exactly happened that made it not practical to write simple sites? Did browsers suddenly stop rendering HTML unless you generate it in JavaScript?

It's not business needs, it's cargo-cult web development. Going with the latest trends without a moment to stop whether it makes sense or is actually what the users want.

[Too]

What exactly is the issue with having the HTML generated with javascript? You can still run "view source", overridden CSS or Greasemonkey on it...

[TeMPOraL]

Why do you need to generate HTML with JS in the first place? There rarely is a need to do so on a website. There's definitely no need for the e.g. loading content of a blog post dynamically just to achieve a fade-in effect[0]. And yet, most of the modern web practices is silly stuff like that.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10646025

[M2Ys4U]

It's not only people who actively disable JS, though. See the How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement? blog post[0] by the UK's Government Digital Service (aka GOV.UK).

They calculated that 1.1% of users don't have the JS enhancements activated, and only 0.3% of those were browsers where JS execution was disabled.

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

[datashovel]

I would guess a majority of that traffic is going to be crawlers. It's probably more like a small fraction of 1% who are actually missing out.

EDIT: Looks like they covered this in comments. Even that doesn't convince me for some reason.

[pdkl95]

Crawlers load images from <noscript> tags? Some might. As googlebot runs Javascript, would an image inside <noscript> be indexed into google image search?

While that's an interesting question, one of my points was about this common type of claim:

> guess

You admit you don't actually know. I don't either, which is why I program defensively and test for any feature I want to use.

A lot of people seem to be projecting what they want to see, reinforced by confirmation bias. Choosing Javascript based analytics is a great way to conclude that almost nobody uses Javascript.

[datashovel]

Good points.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdf...

These are some very popular plugins, so my thinking is maybe the answer lies somewhere in between, where security-conscious users are white listing sites they want to run scripts on. Not that they're running completely in js disabled mode. Even though it's a subtle difference I think it's relevant to the strategy one goes in with regarding noscript tag.

So this would make sense to me. If that's right, that most noscript users are just running these plugins, then those folks know that they're going to miss out with some sites, or they'll selectively enable javascript on a case-by-case basis.

This would probably require more extensive review of logs, to see if the person who originally downloaded the noscript image eventually came back to the site with javascript enabled. The likelihood is this would only happen if the site was not functional when they visited with javascript disabled.

[JupiterMoon]

I don't know a single person that does not run an adblock anymore.

[userbinator]

I happen to know 3 (two of which I convinced into doing so --- and they're not even what I'd consider "advanced users"), and I am one myself.

The majority of informational sites are actually quite usable without JS. I'd say "the browsing equivalent of running only RMS-approved software" would be never allowing JS, but I'm more pragmatic and only enable it if necessary, for the sites I trust and must use.