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Comment by doc_gunthrop | Hacker News Reader

> Content being heavily reliant on JavaScript “injection”

Salient point right here. Being served a blank white page (when JS is disabled) can deter a person from ever visiting a site again. Some peope out there want to vet a site before allowing it to run arbitrary code on their machine.

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Sadly, the majority of web devs don’t give a rat’s butt about those users.

All they do is complain, make special demands, then go on to block ads anyway. It makes it hard to care about those users.

Seems that ad-blocking has made ads worse.

It's called an arms race for a reason

Could've been different if web devs listened when they got told "your ads get overbearing, no one can even try to concentrate on the content anymore" - but they were greedy and ad blocking came about as self defense.

Hence the move toward static site frameworks like react static and gatsby

> run arbitrary code on their machine

That's a bit of an exaggeration. JavaScript is strongly sandboxed and has a pretty good permissions system. The only malicious things it can really do are 1) based on cookies or 2) crypto mining.

Personally I think it's unreasonable to expect today's sites to work without JavaScript completely. The real benefits of using it sparingly are:

- Pages load faster

- Pages are more responsive

- Applications are less stateful and call out to systems that have a larger number of eyes on them, making them less fragile and lowering maintenance complexity

Minimalism is a virtue in any programming context

The microarchitectural side-channel attacks that have received a lot of attention lately really challenge the idea of a "sandbox".

Also the poster said that webpages shouldn't be blank without having, not that they should be fully functional. I think it's reasonable to expect some function without javascript.

3) Fingerprinting and tracking in general are heavily javascript-focused. Less common in practice (I assume), but still possible, are 4) Rowhammer or Spectre/Meltdown style attacks that break out of the permission system. Finally, there's general trickery, manipulation, and malware, like trying to embed a frame from Facebook and steal user credentials or so on (I'm fuzzy on these sorts of attacks, not an expert).

Before javascript took over tracking the 1x1 white pixel ruled the land. No javascript needed there.

3) Right - and I guess "fingerprinting" goes slightly beyond cookies - but when people say "execute arbitrary code" they typically imply something has free-reign, which JavaScript generally doesn't.

4) True, although it's my understanding that the exploits are hard to implement, doubly-so from an abstracted layer like JavaScript.

> trickery, manipulation...like trying to embed a frame from Facebook and steal user credentials or so on

This falls under "cookies-based", and I'm pretty sure no JavaScript is necessary for these kinds of attacks.

Good point on 3. I guess the main point is browsers at least disallow reading and writing arbitrary files directly.

> The only malicious things

And a crappy end user experience. Why do I need to execute code just to read a static, read-only text article?

> JavaScript is strongly sandboxed and has a pretty good permissions system

We now live in a post-Spectre world. I don't think a sandbox means all it meant in 2017.

Can you point to a single real-world example of Spectre being used in a browser attack?

About the only time JavaScript is useful is something like google docs. The rest is just fluff and there’s no reason a webpage should require it.

I am split: web pages can be enhanced with JS, but webpage mostly shouldn't need them (exception: some data visualization does benefit from being able to dynamically change values).

Web apps on the other hand, probably do need them. I use newsblur and definitely enjoy the shortcuts.

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