Comment by elcapitan
11 hours ago
That was the big aha moment last year with Noscript for me. For a long time I avoided it because of the occasional case where I have to whitelist a site, which costs a bit of time.
Now every site has so much forced garbage interaction that with Noscript on average I have way fewer clicks.
I've been using NoScript since 2016, and the number of things that get loaded in via Javascript has sextupled since then. This isn't an exaggeration, some websites like Wal-Mart's went from five extra domains to thirty. Going to Fossil's website to look at a watch for a Christmas gift this year, the domain whitelist panel for NoScript was so long I actually had to scroll down because there were just that many.
And there's no silver bullet to fix it, because there's three parts of it. The first is that these Javascript modules are literally drag and drop, so you can add new functionality in minutes. The second is that most of this stuff is being delivered offsite from a CDN anyways, so why bother doing anything like a static page? And the third is that it forces the users to enable Javascript so that trackers, fingerprinters, third party cookie loggers, and all sorts of other things get their filthy little digits into your window.
Javascript devs aren't going to change, because they don't want things to be harder and slower (putting side the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem). The hosts don't want things to revert, because then that's more money paid for bandwidth when that cost can instead be dropped in someone else's lap. And the little bastards doing the tracking definitely aren't going to change, because it's a source of money for doing nothing other than being a voyeur.
I still block Javascript everywhere just so that things will actually work and won't crash my browser by eating an entire gigabyte of RAM just loading fonts from some third party website. I still recommend other people to as well. Not because I think it will actually protect them, but instead to show them just how inefficient and predatory modern website design is. It spooks people when they see two dozen URLs that aren't the website they're currently on.
I've started to encounter news outlets / etc that use JavaScript to load most of the article. So if you don't have it enabled you get like one or two paragraphs and that's it. Usually I didn't care about the article that much anyway, but it's still annoying.