> <i>and I could browse the web with fewer distractions—all without the sense of guilt that comes with using an ad blocker</i><p>Never felt the slightest skerrick of guilt for using an ad blocker.<p>Instead I feel mildly virtuous in doing my own small part in helping the idea of an ad-supported internet die.
I have been using NoScript (a browser extension to black list all JS by default) for quite a while now, and I don't see myself turning back anytime soon.<p>Everything feels much faster, and sober without Javascript, especially news site (looking at you, lemonde.fr)<p>I still allow some JavaScript sometimes, most of the time to unbreak site, but if you start you using it you will realise that most of the JS running on each site is at best useless from a user point of view.
wired.com, please learn from your own article and don't try to load 22 3rd party javascripts.<p><a href="http://picpaste.com/wired_com-yt7ooXyu.png" rel="nofollow">http://picpaste.com/wired_com-yt7ooXyu.png</a>
Sadly JavaScript or "the language of the web" is going towards binary rather then openness. The big sites like Google already obfuscate their code so it's hard to see what it does.<p>I learned JavaScript by viewing other peoples source code, witch was as easy as right clicking and selecting view source.<p>Unless we want more people to disable JavaScript, we need to keep it open source and transparent!
Tried turning off javascript completely for a time once, but then a lot(Edit: Don't actually keep count, maybe I should begin doing that) of pages are blank/white emptiness because they do all the html in the browser....
Try <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/</a>, that will make it even more interesting and show you that _everyone_ is including jquery from Google.
Whoa, this guy managed to uncheck "enable javascript" somehow? Glad to read such a cutting edge article.<p>In seriousness, disabling javascript (and enabling it selectively when things inevitably break when I was using NoScript) grew too tedious for me after a while.<p>There are simply too many sites that require JS to function properly. Others may disagree and enjoy clicking constantly to enable select javascripts to get pages to work properly (or maybe don't visit JS intensive sites), but in my experience it isn't worth it.
Switched to surf+tabbed and default no JS years ago. Can't imagine going back. CTRL-ALT-s enables it for the tab if it's necessary; usually not.
Sure. If you believe that the browser should only be a document reader and not an application platform then go ahead. It's kinda like buying a smartphone and then using it exclusively as a phone though....<p>I think the real point of irritation here is all the 3rd party junk that gets loaded in that has nothing to do with the main functionality of the site that you are on.
Two things that caught my eye in this article were "Many people have turned to ad blockers" and "A small but growing number of people, however, are taking ad-blocking a step further and just disabling JavaScript altogether". For the first quote, I know many people in tech who use ad blockers (but maybe still not a majority?), but I'm pretty sure they aren't all that prevalent outside of it (or why would advertisers bother?). As for the second quote, is this actually true or supported by any real evidence?
I've been doing this for a while now after becoming tuned into the tracking and particularly fingerprinting being done. The web is surprisingly usable with it off. I use SafeScript in Chrome which generally works ok. I use multiple profiles in Chrome, one with just Adblock the other with Adblock, noscript, httpseverywhere, privacy badger, etc. I use the normal one where I absolutely must and that doesn't keep cookies.<p>I'm not paranoid and I don't have anything to hide but I object to being tracked to have stuff sold to me.
I use uMatrix, uBlock0, and privacy badger, and am very happy about it. 1st party scripts are turned on by default by uMatrix, and for those that break, I selectively turn them on. Privacy Badger takes care of blocking cookies (first or third party) that try to track you.
In Firefox, the "disable javascript" checkbox is now gone from the settings --why would they do that?<p>But it can still be disabled in `about:config` > `javascript.enabled`<p>I used and loved Firefox since more than 10 years so far, but can't truly understand some decisions they took.
I've disabled anything 3rd party and all scripting via uBlock. When I really need some site to work 100%, I'll just selectively enable the parts that are required for that site. The little button makes it easy to whitelist stuff case by case.
Disclaimer: I own an ipad 1 (and love it!)<p>On an iPad1, your best choice is indeed to disable JavaScript. (Note that the ipad1 has 256 MB of RAM. That sounds enough, but it is not! May be because of a poor optimization of Safari on iOS5)
I wouldn't mind some JS on this page to hide the conversations that don't interest me. Also, why make a request for 5x more data, reflow, and redraw everything whenever I click something?
I doubt if there is some alternate for the wonder full things that we can do with JS. But Its true that at sometimes things are missused and in case of JS its a top business now a days