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Comment by towb | Hacker News Reader

"Have they switched off JavaScript? - People still do." Is that really a valid case 2021?

I browse with uMatrix and JS disabled. If you're site makes me enable more than 3 different 3rd party scripts, I usually just fuck right off. I actively work to avoid it, and will remember it and actively trash your site and mock your users to anyone given the chance.

Yes I'm that much of an asshole.

Does your site mostly work without JS untill I want to do/use 'other thing'? Then I'll normally just white list the whole site because I know that you've at least considered what needs to be and what doesn't need to be included.

What about sites with only first-party scripts?

If your site only loads scripts from local you and I are good. I've Even globally whitelisted a few like jQuery and the rest.

but more often than not I have to scroll past more than a few untrustworthy data mining domains just to find the CDN that's distributing your magic JavaScript. Those are the ones that piss me off.

I'm known to just edit the page directly in the console if it annoys me too much. I'm a _heavy_ user of privacy-preserving extensions.

Yes - see the popularity of uBlock Origin, NoScript, uMatrix etc.

Neither uBlock or uMatrix blanket disable JavaScript.

My uMatrix config does :P

but being able to disable it is the whole point of installing it and it does disable third-party by default.

I know they have the capability to block scripts, but this is the first time I'm hearing that blocking all javascript on all websites is the primary purpose of both uBlock and uMatrix.

Their strength is in selective and goal-oriented blocking, in a way that doesn't break nearly every website by default.

HN may be giving a skewed idea of how truly popular things like NoScript are.

On nearly every thread on Hacker News there are a few posts from people who have JavaScript turned off who will say “this site is blank”

Despite all of them knowing exactly why it's blank and what they'd need to do to use the site ;)

But it's a choice, like not having a smartphone, the rest of us still want and can have nice things. In the cases where it's not a choice it's something else, some may need to make sure it still works. I'm not going to do it, I have no reason to.

On many sites javascript is about ad-tracking, not "nice things".

For example, cnn.com shows no content with javascript disabled. By itself html is perfectly capable of displaying text and graphics, that's what it is designed for. Taking a quick look it appears that about half of the scripts loaded on their front page are for ad-tracking. A gizmodo page I'm looking at now wants to load 37 scripts for some reason. ublock is showing me 14 ad-tracking items.

I'd rather avoid such sites. So I go somewhere else if they don't work with javascript disabled. I can make per-site exceptions, but I'd rather not.

(In the above examples, I use lite.cnn.com to consume news articles news MUCH more quickly, and gizmodo with javascript disabled still showed me the text of the article I was interested in, so I'm happy.)

I agree with you, this shouldn’t even be an issue in 2021.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com