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by throwaway58670 1385 days ago
I recently read a thread about privacy here. One point was that the one best thing you can do is disable JavaScript. So I decided to try it. I installed Brave on my phone and disabled pretty much everything, including all cookies.

My thinking was, all I do is browse HN, hn.algolia, and lobsters. Those should work, right? Well lobsters works perfectly, including collapsing comments.

HN loses the ability to collapse comments. But algolia is the worst. Not only does it require JS, being an SPA, but it refuses to work until you enable cookies! My theory is that it reads the settings (popular, 24-hour) from a cookie, and plain dies if they're not there.

On another note, and to a pleasant surprise, a lot of the web works perfectly fine, and feels a lot snappier, including even google search. And many of the annoying cookie and paywall popups never appear, since they appear to be implemented in JS.

So yes, if you haven't tried it, I recommend you do. You can always whitelist sites you trust or really need to use.