[NAR8789]

It's a squarespace site, and this particular behavior is pretty universal to squarespace sites, near as I can tell.

Since it's due to the squarespace, I wouldn't really characterize this as "third-party" javascript per se, but I agree it's annoying the page needs javascript to even render. Boo on squarespace.

If you don't want to enable all third-party scripts, try uMatrix (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...). It has very fine-grained control over what assets you allow from where (it's why I knew offhand this was squarespace). A warning though: it's got a bit of a learning curve, and depending on how restrictive you want things, you will probably end up spending a fair amount of time un-breaking the internet.

Needing third-party scripts isn't necessarily evil in my mind though--aside from squarespace-like cases where a page loads scripts from the underlying platform (squarespace, or custom domains on top of medium), the other common case I see is loading scripts straight from cdnjs or similar. Is it really evil or insecure to load jquery from cdnjs?

[lisper]

Strange, it works for me on an ancient version of Safari (9.1.3) that's kitted out with ghostery and JS blocker. Most modern sites don't work on it, but this one did.

[userbinator]

That's probably because that version of Safari ignores this little bugger:

    .site.page-loading { opacity: 0 }

I used the developer tools in Firefox to disable that one and the page was instantly viewable without JavaScript.

That's right, the site uses CSS to hide all the content and then presumably reenables it somewhere in the gobs of JS, maybe after its loaded whatever other analytics/tracking crap there is. Absolutely vile.