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by creatonez 27 days ago
Indeed, <noscript> doesn't show just because the page didn't properly load the scripts in the page. It's not a fallback for errors, it's a fallback to serve users who deliberately disabled Javascript. This is a rare scenario these days, but it does get displayed when you disable JS in Tor Browser, use the disable Javascript button in uBlock Origin (I personally use this to whitelist javascript per-domain), or use various other extensions like NoScript. This is dependent on the implementation, though. In theory some crappy browser extension could provide JS disabling functionality otherwise identical to tor/ublock/noscript but forget to display <noscript>s, but I haven't heard of implementations that are like this.

Either way, make sure you have something sensible to display for all scenarios, even if it's just an error page. Mysterious blank pages are not fun.

2 comments

> In theory some crappy browser extension could provide JS disabling functionality otherwise identical to tor/ublock/noscript but forget to display <noscript>s, but I haven't heard of implementations that are like this.

Any no-JS extension worths its salt should actually at least provide an option to ignore <noscript> as some websites that would otherwise work perfectly fine without JS use it maliciously.

Not sure if uBlock Origin has a checkbox to turn off <noscript> globally, but since it is an ad blocker, you could just manually add a global filter on all <noscript> tags. Or you could rely on the community's filter lists to remove specific instances of bullshit found in popular websites.
You also have small browsers like Dillio that intentionally don't support javascript https://dillo-browser.github.io/