[coldpie]

> I understand that privacy is a big issue, but think about "normal" web developers who just want to show a cool working website to their users, but need to display this message to them: "Thank you for looking at our website, but unfortunately your browser is in lite JavaScript mode. Please set it to full functionality again and restart your browser en go to our site once more.".

My brain melted out of my ears when I read this sentence. Why on Earth do you need JavaScript to display a "cool" website? So you can make the text fade in for no reason? I think you need to re-think what the Internet is for.

[ioulian]

As a developer in a web agency, we create a lot of "fancy" (= sites that are interesting to look at, and they need to draw attention) websites, no it is not to create a text fade that can be done in CSS btw.

It is to validate forms with ajax, it is to display ajax loaded content, it is to upload a file without needing a page refresh, to create a simple image slider/viewer, ...

Of course the content is king, but do not forget that there are a lot of stuff going around content. Look at Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, ... Sure they could work without any Javascript at all, but it will not be the same experience.

Like somebody here already said, we beginning to create web apps because it's possible and because it's cheaper to do directly in the browser than to hire a native device developer (another discussion).

We can't forget Javascript nowadays, it's a big and popular language for a reason, it allows the developers to create interesting user experiences (and apps) inside a browser. There are a lot of fine examples of good javascript implementations, but of course there are also companies that use it the "bad" way.

[coldpie]

Sure, if you need user interaction, it's reasonable to build a web app. But the vast majority of websites are simply conveying information. You don't need vast amounts of JavaScript just to shove text at a user, but a fair number of websites break anyway.