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by bogwog 1741 days ago
It's the kind of thing where you have to try it for yourself. No javascript == best user experience possible.

* instant load times

* stable performance

* no tracking, and sometimes even no ads

* no stupid animations that break scrolling, ask you to sign up for newsletters, etc

* no hijacked back button, or disabled highlighting/copy/paste, or pop ups/unders

Unless you're trying to play games, or use some complicated web application like an IDE, javascript offers absolutely nothing of value to you. It only exists to benefit the owner of the website. For 99.999% of web browsing use-cases, HTML/CSS is all that's needed.

The only situation I can think of where javascript has the potential to offer an improved user experience is with infinite scrolling. That's personal preference though, so if it's something you value, I could understand wanting to enable javascript.

(also, I just checked and noticed that Twitter refuses to work if you disable js. Fuck you, Twitter.)

4 comments

> No javascript == best user experience possible

And yet in every thread there's at least one person complaining about the posted link not working with JS disabled.

Of course, since that means the page requires javascript, and is thus providing an inferior user experience. Who wouldn't complain about that?
Your comment reminds me of this good old meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/674/802...

Sure, if you disable JS you'll have a worse experience, but it's your fault, not the site creators'.

You can still track without javascript. One way is using invisible img tags. It can be less effective though.
> For 99.999% of web browsing use-cases, HTML/CSS is all that's needed.

Many people use the web to buy things. Button presses, logins, pizza tracking monitors, they all use JS.

None of those require JS at all, except the pizza monitor.
How can you send information to your backend server without JS?
Back in the days (I'm 33 and thus quite old in web years) we would use forms
Submit buttons or links. Then the whole page reloads.

There might be tricks using CSS and images too.

This is like a technical invocation of Poe's law.
Full time freelance web dev here. Literally every site I make requires JavaScript to run. No one has ever complained about this.

It would be much harder to make them work without JavaScript.