[rembicilious]

My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?)

So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com

The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains!

That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function. I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name.

Page refreshes.

Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains!

..Anyways Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep. It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices.

If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin

[caymanjim]

Sounds like it takes you 20 minutes of logistics to look at a web page.

Ain't nobody got time to live like this.

[nolist_policy]

NoScript as a antipattern, because it disincentivises browsing new websites. As you observed, for every new website you need to reload the page quite a few times to get it functional.

[rembicilious]

I don’t ever install NoScript on family/friend devices. It just breaks their experience. I have knowledgeable coworkers that won’t use it because it’s not worth the hassle for them.

So I agree it is an anti-pattern for typical use cases.

But if you’re trying to get the most out of old hardware, it will make some websites more usable.

[whizzter]

That's the point, a _website_ should mostly be text,css and images and that works 100% fine with NoScript out of the box.

My pattern is basically browsing the wild net with FF/Noscript and use Chrome for "apps" (gmail,sheets,etc) that i feel have a reason to use JS.

[kazinator]

It mainly disincentivizes using scummy sites the fetch JavaScript from 20 domains.

Sites that just fetch JavaScript from their own domain, not as much.

[Jach]

GTM is just another JS CDN, like unpkg and jsDelivr and others I forget. What amuses me is sometimes a site will use all three. Often, none are necessary for the core site to work; having had to help add support for GTM once to a site builder product, I think the target demographic is PMs who want to add random marketing/ad/analytics/audience-segmented scripts to a site.

Very rarely it'll happen that I'll care enough to go through the list of possible domains to temporarily whitelist before finally giving GTM a shot, then immediately remove the whitelist. Usually I don't get that far, especially because if it hasn't worked by then, enabling GTM doesn't tend to work either, it's just a bad site that isn't actually providing what it claimed to provide. NoScript has never disincentivized me from visiting a new site, but it has made me give up on some or look for alternatives. My daily experience is pretty minimally impacted by it. (Still, I don't usually bother installing it on work machines or my travel laptop (which is remoting to my home PC most of the time anyway), and sometimes I'll just load the page up in a chromium tab (incognito or not) rather than play the game of five refreshes from whitelisting JS.)

The performance impact is quite minimal I think, especially if you compare the difference between Firefox with NoScript and Chromium without, the latter is just faster because it's not Firefox. The oldest machines I still use sometimes are from 2009 (with an i7 920, pretty good for the time) which as my old daily-driver I used NoScript, and 2017 (my travel laptop with an i7 7820HQ) where I don't bother. Neither is all that slower for web stuff than my current daily driver with a Ryzen 9 5900X. The web is just slow even with newer hardware. (In contrast to others here though, I immediately notice the difference of better hardware with local applications, especially content authoring ones like gimp or krita.)