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by pqdbr 819 days ago
This is an honest question: are you browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled?
4 comments

You'd be surprised by the number of people who does that. Not everyone has a fancy browser and not everyone can see.
Supporting JavaScript makes a browser "fancy?"

People who can't see use the same browsers as everyone else and they run JavaScript.

https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey10/#javascript

If you cannot see, what use is a font?
And what if you arrive at the site not knowing it's about a font? How are you supposed to find out?
Even if almost no one disables Javascript because the web is unfortunately hardly usable without it, it show that absolutely no fucks are given.

There is no reason for Javascript to be required on that page, it is static and should be nothing more than a simple HTML file with a few images, the font and a style sheet. It is slow on a decent desktop PC with a fiber connection, I can't imagine on an old smartphone. Recently featured on HN: https://danluu.com/slow-device/

But maybe we shouldn't blame the author too much, she is using Squarespace, that's the kind of service people use when they don't want to deal with these technical details. But Squarespace should know better and be ashamed of delivering such crap to their customers.

> are you browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled?

I use uMatrix to disable most Javascript by default, and enable sources one-by-one if necessary for a web app. There’s no need to use Javascript on a blog post, certainly not to dynamically load in HTML text and images, so I generally don’t even bother to enable it, and just hit the back button.

The way I look at it is, a web interaction is a conversation: my browser asks a server for a resource, and the server returns it. This makes sense for static HTML: ‘server, please send me this blog post’; ‘sure, here you go, and here are some images or fonts or whatever to make it prettier.’ This, OTOH, feels just wrong: ‘server, please send me this blog post’; ‘sure, here is this list of instructions for you to follow to assemble to blog post.’

Web apps are fine, Javascript is fine for that. Forcing the use of Javascript to do what HTML already can do natively is just wrong.

Not the parent, but, why yes! I AM browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled. It's a technology that adds no value to any of the content I am interested in, you know, just reading -- content that can be expressed in HTML tags without being injected into a DOM.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...

Hey now, Javascript adds plenty of value to advertisers, crackers, CPU vendors and browser manufacturers seeking lock-in!

Seriously, it does have use in building web apps, but the vast, vast majority of web sites I encounter should be static, or progressively enhanced.