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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

let's be honest here, no company is going to make change for the 0.001% who happen to disable javascript

As I said, this isn't just a problem for no-JS browsers, it's also a problem for people with slow Internet connections. They might be able to load the HTML and CSS reasonably fast, but then they'll have to sit around waiting while megabytes of JS is downloaded and then executed before they can finally read the article.

I'm not asking developers to do extra work to accommodate no-JS browsers, I'm asking them to not do extra work to deliberately prevent sites from working without JS. The page would have worked perfectly if the author had not done extra work to add a useless loading screen. I'm asking developers to do less work, not more.

No reason to generate that page using Javascript, it's just a blog post. It took 10 seconds to load on my computer by the way, when loading should be almost immediate considering the little amount of text on that page.

If you are going to show me a pre-loader at least inform me about what is about to be loaded. 1 second more of wait and i would have left that page.

I have javascript on and gigabit internet. It still took over 10 seconds for this page to show me readable content.

This doesn't just apply to the people with JS off.

It was even sillier for me... I have broadband. The content loaded just fine and I started reading it and the loading screen came up over it and blocked it. Stupid-ware.

uBlock Origin: right-click > block element... gone.

>It's not just the minority of people who browse with JavaScript disabled who are bothered by this, think of all the people on slow Internet connections who have to wait for your megabyte+ JavaScript program to download and execute

For example, what about the growing population of users in the developing world for whom "slow" internet is the norm?

I've seen this point being brought up a lot, but I'm wondering how many of those people that actually lack good internet connection and live in developing world may be your target anyway?

I'm currently in South Florida, that just had Hurricane Irma blow through. I have no power (but I do have a generator [1]) and the DSL is down (no dial tone on the landline). I'm currently using my cellphone as a hotspot and an iPad as a laptop. I don't have a large data plan because, frankly, I don't use my cellphone as a hotspot all that often.

But when I do, I am painfully aware of just how much crap is included on every page. Oh, Verizon makes me painfully aware. Yes, I could get the "unlimited" dataplan, but I don't use the dataplan to make it cost effective for me (the last time a hurriane knocked the power out for me was back in 2005).

And I have it good! A few of my fellow cow-orkers have even worse cell coverage than I do.

[1] Keeping the refridgerator, freezer, a couple of lamps, a few fans, and iPhone/iPad chargers going.

For bandwidth emergencies I use Opera Mini, which can run everything through a compressing proxy before you get it- lossily compressing images (or even stripping them out) and reducing my bandwidth due to casual web browsing by about an order of magnitude. It works wonders on pages that are mostly text.

You do have to not mind routing all your traffic through Opera's servers, though.

I understand, but your situation is state emergency in which the very infrastructure is damaged, and not "the default" - you'll priorities will likely be different than ones people I'm targeting have and focused on recovering access to electricity/clean water, etc. ect. This will likely differ from people in so called rising markets too.

I would assume that more than 0.001% of the people use the Tor browser.

The number of people using Tor is probably less then the number if people who disable JavaScript.

If you count bridges, then .001% is pretty close (not more than .005%). Apparently about 1/3 of people on earth have a mobile broadband connection, so approximately 2 billion of those, and ~60K tor bridge connections.

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