Granted, people who disable javascript are obviously vastly outnumbered, but just saying "fuck you" to security conscious (and most likely tech-savvy) users seems like a mistake.
Granted, people who disable javascript are obviously vastly outnumbered, but just saying "fuck you" to security conscious (and most likely tech-savvy) users seems like a mistake.
1. Turn it on for that site. (But this can be problematic if there are 15 different domains to turn it on for, only 12 of which are about showing me ads.)
2. Use IEtab in Firefox (not working as well recently).
3. Paste the URL into a different browser. I use IE mainly for my several least favorite sites and services -- Facebook, WebEx, etc. So I'm unlike to mess things up too badly by viewing some JavaScript-heavy page in there.
4. Live without the site that demands all the JavaScript.
Now, one might hypothesize that a security-conscious, ad-hating web surfer as myself isn't a bit loss for most consumer websites. So perhaps it all works out in the end. But there also are a few companies that would pay a lot of money to have me look at their websites -- a fact that I infer from them paying PR people to attempt to get my attention -- and miss out solely because it's too hard to beat the Javascript requirement.
According to developer.yahoo.com[1],
> After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic[...].
I work for a medium sized company that version tests almost every change we make, and in the end the version that wins is the feature with the higher conversion rate.
[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript-d...
Conversion rate is a limited metric. It misses the entire concept of word-of-mouth. Conversion rate can't measure people who don't show up in the first place.
I expect NoScript users to be more sophisticated "power users" - the kind of users that regular users go to for advice. If they aren't using your site then they will never recommend it to their more naive and more easily converted friends.