[mulhoon]

How do you even browse the web? Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?

[ruuda]

Not the poster, but I also leave js disabled by default. Meltdown/Spectre made it very clear that automatically executing untrusted third-party code securely is basically impossible. I browse the web using Chromium. I don’t think it’s common for people to disable js, but it works way better than you might expect. It’s easy to add an exception for the handful of sites that really need it. (Just three clicks.) Half of the web becomes better (no ads, no cookie banners). The other half stops working entirely, but usually that’s just a reminder that the content was probably not worth reading in the first place.

[bee_rider]

I keep it disabled by default (noscript) it is a tossup, lots of sites just load the essentials with JavaScript disabled and are, as a result, much better. Others break entirely. The ones that totally break tend to be the silly over-designed ones though. Most useful info is available in plain text (see the phenomenon of an old research professor’s home page).

How common? Dunno. People here talk about it whenever it comes up. As a website for chit-chatting about tech stuff we have an unusually large population that cares about this kind of stuff, though.

[zahlman]

> How do you even browse the web?

With NoScript, and some basic expectations for web designers to try to honour that "graceful degradation" concept that we were all assured was definitely a thing many years ago.

> Is it common for people to disable JavaScript?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/ claims about a quarter of a million users. Which I suppose is really not very much in the grand scheme of things. But there are also people getting similar effects using uBlock and other such tools.

But I don't care how popular this is or isn't. It's my computer and this is how I operate it. And I advocate strongly for others to follow suit, because there are numerous advantages.

[temp0826]

I usually keep js disabled by default with uBO and enable it per-site when it fails. Not terribly inconvenient (worst is auth workflows that bounce you through a few domains, but just save your settings as you go through it and you would only need to do that once for that flow).

[zzo38computer]

Many people do, including myself (but I don't know how common it is by percentage though, but it is probably low). Although some web pages do not work, some work better. Even if it does not work, sometimes I can find the data and can still use it due to that, or use the API.

[aendruk]

Progressive enhancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

And empirically, failure of a site to follow this principle tends to correlate with being unhealthy or unbearable in other ways.

There are of course countless exceptions, which I allowlist with a couple of clicks. But overall I find browsing this way to be a breath of fresh air.

[guelo]

I do it as well. I'm sure it's a lot more common among HN's techie audience than the general population.

[CamperBob2]

It's the modern "I don't even own a TV."

[HelloUsername]

How _do_ you browse the web with Js enabeld?

[1bpp]

Using an ad blocker. Noscript seems far more annoying than useful to me, resource usage is almost never an issue and everyone is tracking me through my phone regardless.

[can16358p]

Putting aside security/privacy implications,

Why not?

[mvdtnz]

No it's not common which is why most of us don't bother to support it. They are an incredibly noisy minority though.

[hamburglar]

I don’t have time to browse the web. I’m too busy talking about how I have JavaScript blocked.