[danmg]

It was not well liked.

The majority of webpages did not use it, or it was used very sparingly for things like form validation.

Old versions of IE would have a dialog pop up if there was any kind of error during execution which happened frequently.

[asveikau]

Not only that, for years afterwards the techie crowd and equivalent of places like HN (I suppose I am mostly talking about slashdot) had a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content, etc.

I don't know exactly when the tides turned on this attitude. In 2000 the above were not controversial opinions. By 2010 it was gone, and I saw people call it crazy talk, but it probably happened earlier than that. Probably things like gmail in 2004 were a turning point.

[LandR]

>a lot of people saying it was bad, a nuisance, should be disabled in the browser, webpages should fail gracefully to non-JS content,

I still feel like this.

[asveikau]

Me too, I think. We're a minority though. I'm giving deference to the new normal.

[karatestomp]

My love of a paycheck drives me to give deference to the new normal. Meanwhile real desktop programs are still way more pleasant to use and way more respectful of my system resources, and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

[asveikau]

> and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though. gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its response times. A well thought out AJAX solution could give you minimal load times for data. The issue lately is when the JS code is too big, not well tuned, and gives the equivalent of several 90s-era-website-full-pageloads worth of data with every action. That is to say a lot of websites aren't as lean as they could be.

I'm not a web focused person so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, this is my outsider's perspective.

[karatestomp]

“AJAX” when it was mostly grabbing chunks of HTML to insert or otherwise not doing much but “grab, render” was sometimes faster. Not so much these days.

[danmg]

It was two things around 2004-5: 1) people using GWT to make SPAs and 2) the ability to lazy load content through XMLHttpRequest.

GWT was essentially what typescript is today but java and it handled most of the nasty DOM related stuff and browser incompatibilities.

[NeoBasilisk]

RIP progressive enhancement

[jherdman]

This. The tooling and development environment for JavaScript has improved by leaps and bounds. As an early adopted I found JS to be a pain in the ass. These days I dare say it's one of my favourite languages.

[karatestomp]

With TypeScript and async/await papering over its greatest sins and inconveniences, it's not half bad.

[pimlottc]

I wouldn’t say it was unliked. It enabled image rollovers and people _loved_ those.

[danmg]

People liked the rollovers, not javascript. You'd see people try doing them in flash, shockwave, as java applets, activex controls, and I'm probably missing a few.

If they were done in javascript, the code was heavily cargo-culted and cut and paste.