Comment by sysadm1n
4 years ago
Done my usual ritual of temporarily enabling JS with uBlock Origin to view the page, and was trolled heavily. Bravo!
SPAs have their place. They fail when a webpage that can be done with HTML & CSS alone is 'appified' and requires JS to view.
Many webmasters over-engineer a website with JS bells and whistles, which is terrible for accessibility, often adding fake loading spinners to give the illusion the page is loading new content, when the content is already there.
Also you see artificial delays & animations when you scroll, AKA 'scroll spying' with content jumping onto the screen, because, hey, you can do that, but it doesn't mean you should!
How is the day-to-day experience of browsing the web with JS disabled by default (genuine question)? I feel like I would attempt to browse JS-free and then get frustrated with the number of pages that don't function without it. Possibly similar to using DDG and constantly having to !g every second search.
You end up allowing first-party scripts from most sites that you frequent (except the ones that don't actually require it for basic functionality, but use it to implement anti-features), leaving third-party scripts disabled most places. After you've been browsing this way for a month or two and your ruleset is reasonably populated, the annoyances are almost entirely with clicking random links on HN and Reddit; often, I decide a poorly-accessible site probably wasn't worth my time anyways, but I'll reconsider if the comments indicate otherwise.
Well most articles on HN work fine with JS disabled by default, apart from /show which usually has JS SPAs.
To be honest, it is a pain sometimes having to temporarily enable JS with uBo just to make a website work, but it's the price I pay for a modicum of privacy (and accessibility) on the web.
I have good muscle memory though, and the act of enabling JS with uBo is so ingrained in me, that I often do it without much effort.