RemoveJS – Remove JavaScript from any website | Hacker News Reader

RemoveJS – Remove JavaScript from any website

remove-js.com

I can't be the only one that feels the whole "no js" argument is flawed. Its like "yeah it's harder to do malicious things if I disable JS, it's also harder to do malicious things if I don't look at HTML at all!".

Feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There is also the idea that rendering news, blogs, and plenty of other form content can and should work without JavaScript.

I admit that JS brings a whole lot of simplicity to situations that would be tedious otherwise. The problem is that the maliciousness that can exist with js can sometimes outweigh it's usefulness.

Looking at HN, which uses js for voting, can be replaced with the olde-school form submission method (at increased page reloads etc), so clearly JS is doing us a favor.

But many sites we visit are consume only (blogs and news) and the rest are generally what we interact with only very infrequently (HN, fb, twitter). It's a rare site that actively needs js (excluding all those react/vue architected sites) that doesn't need human interaction on the first place (eg slack and chat sites that need streaming/comet server responses)

Random thought: Maybe we could investigate a methodology of "jit" for js in response to human interaction. Browsers already do this to limit access to the clipboard functionality. That is, js will run only if the user clicks on a button, etc, but is otherwise dormant (even document.onload would be delayed until first click). Anything else would require permission to run. Of course, this would break the web as it exists now.

> Looking at HN, which uses js for voting, can be replaced with the olde-school form submission method (at increased page reloads etc), so clearly JS is doing us a favor.

The JS here is is an optional enhancement that does the vote in the background. Disable JavaScript and voting still works, it just causes the page to reload. (Aside: it works by using links, but forms so that it’s a POST would be better.)

Surely it cannot be me who is wrong, it is all of those who are insulted by my work who are in error.

If someone else chooses to disable JS by default, it impacts the rest of us in exactly 0 ways, so what's the problem? Certainly you can see the potential upsides, better performance, faster load times, most ads won't work, less 3rd party tracking, etc.

Oh, as someone who's fluent in this stuff I can see the benefits.

My issue is with people who complain that a site doesn't work without javascript. All I can think to say is "ya so?".

I don't mean to sound petulant, I really don't.

But it's one of these things that the general market has decided is optimal. Not for build sizes but for building in general.

I’m with you. I’m all for progressive enhancement, but beyond simplistic examples (like HN voting or fancy inputs that can fall back to HTML builtins), it’s very hard—and sometimes impossible, depending on what you need to do.

I think really it comes down to where you draw the line between “document” and “application”. A document should probably work fine without needing to run any additional code. For an application, I don’t think that’s a reasonable request.

Here's the thing: there are so many websites that would just simply be better without JS. So many simple blog posts that all the content is simple plain text and does not need anything beyond HTML and maybe some CSS. Us JS "haters" aren't arguing against web apps or interactivity - it's the wanton misuse and abuse of the technology.

By conflating our position with "well, just turn your computer off!" you're constructing a strawman.

You are obviously not the only one with this view. Perhaps you are feeling this way because you frequent HN, which has a vocal number of commenters who really want to turn off JS in everything.

Interesting that "https://remove-js.com" is reported an invalid URL by remove-js.com

> This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

Oh, boy. This early? The link is on HN for less than an hour and the site already panicked.

Or it was already using Cloudflare

That message usually appears on cloudflare sites using Hcaptcha

This time it’s not the “fill out a CAPTCHA to gain access” thing, but rather the more aggressive “no, you just flat-out can’t access this site” form.

Yes. It is enabled by the website owner. I can that on many russian sites that ban all non-russian IP's.

Can't see the website because of cloudflare issues. I prefer the whitelist approach to JS on the web using noscript. JS is by default disabled on any domain and I can whitelist domains temporarily or permanently from the extension.

Works well for reading medium.com and you can paste a whole URL in there not just the domain [0].

I will have to make an iOS bookmarklet for this since Apple doesn't allow disabling JS on a per site basis.

[0] https://remove-js.com/https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how...

I searched for the same on iOS and now use Brave as browser with JS deactivated by default, since it has the functionality to quickly switch on JS for the current site only.

I don't think this works well with <noscript> tags and this makes me realise I dont actually know how <noscript> works with browsers

Yes that's something I need to work on. Basically if you disable JS browser side, the browser ignores the <script> tags and loads the content of <noscript>

remove-js.com just strips out the <script> tags, so the noscript tag remains, it just doesn't know to do anything.

Might be worth adding another small script to iterate through the <noscript > tags and unwrap them.

I find it bizarre that so many tech-literate people seem upset by Cloudflare DDOS/surge mitigation. Like, it just seems so backwards to me that failing more catastrophically is somehow more endearing to these individuals!

The mitigation is more of an annoyance to many people since they have to sit and wait for 5 seconds for CF to do their checking before proceeding to the main website. Their DDOS protection sometime got me stuck in their DDOS protection screen, it looped infinity. Sometime no-cache reload will not work. It just their protection can be a fickle.

if your IP somehow ever ends up on the cloudflare shitlist and have to suddenly fill out minute-long captchas every time you visit one of what feels like half of all websites, you'll know why

What's the difference between this and disabling scripts in your browser?

This provides you with a link you can share with other people who might not know how to disable JS in their browser.

I created it to help show clients how their website behaves without Javsascript support.

Nice idea, might come in handy when sharing one of those atrocious news websites that want to show you anything but the news, especially confusing and unusable for non-tech people.

I used to use the "print view" page those sites used to have, but that seems to be a thing of the past, so this might be a good replacement.

Thanks for making this public. That's a fantastic use case that I hadn't considered.

Funny, I have been playing with Cloudflare Worker last night to build a simple POC around "noscript": https://noscript.rabaix.net/https://news.ycombinator.com/ite...

I guess, is going to break easily with the free cloudflare quota ;)

Would you share your code?

Here's this page with no JS. https://remove-js.com/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2...

CSS seems to break somewhat. Does hacker news rely on JS for CSS styling?

No, seems more like remove-js and hacker news aren't playing well together. HN reference's it's one stylesheet relatively, so the remove-js output builds an invalid URL like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25276193/news.css?7xnRK...

Nah, it’s just not joining URLs correctly, and so is trying to load the wrong stylesheet:

  Base URL:             https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25276193
  Relative URL:         news.css?7xnRK0pv8n1Oh7woNqhn
  Correct resolved URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?7xnRK0pv8n1Oh7woNqhn
  Actual resolved URL:  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25276193/news.css?7xnRK0pv8n1Oh7woNqhn

Good catch! I'll try to fix this one

Two things to make sure you’re doing:

• Parse according to the URL Standard: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/

• Use the correct base URL: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#document-base-url; this means largely “take the first base element with an href attribute, if it exists; if so, resolve its href attribute relative to the document URL; otherwise, use the document URL”.

How does HN know where in the page to bring you back to after you submit a comment?

The comment ID that you're replying to is included in the reply button. For example, yours looks like: reply?id=25277197&goto=item%3Fid%3D25276193%2325277197

Note the id element. Then, notice that the span that appears immediately before your comment has an ID too: unv_25277197. With those two pieces, adding a URI fragment is enough to get back to the right place.

Here is a little snippet you can add as a bookmark to load the current page you are viewing with remove-js.com

javascript:window.location.href='http://remove-js.com/'+window.location.href

I am not even fine with no jQuery :) I like it, it's easier than js sometimes.

Doesn't work with event handlers: https://remove-js.com/http://14.rs

Tried it on YouTube and it doesn't work and can't play videos.

Is there a similar service to this where I can access these services like Netflix or Uber without being spied on?

If you want Uber without "spying" I think you're looking for a taxi.

disappointing response for this one https://remove-js.com/https://remove-js.com

This also seems to remove img srcset from any website?

Regularly using this to get around paywalls and no-Adblock overlays

Cloudflare thinks I'm an attacker. Thank you Cloudflare, very cool.

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