Slightly Nerdy

I was reading a blog post¹ the other day, and in my usual ADHD way, was flicking back and forth to other tabs. I got a little confused when I went to go back to it, and the title and favicon had changed to something entirely different. Returning to the tab, an overlay had been placed over the page, making the case for disabling Javascript by default, and linking to disable-javascript.org.

It turns out, you don't need to do anything as drastic as disabling JS for the entire browser these days, you can ask uBlock Origin to instead have it disabled by default and selectively allow it as needed.

So I gave it a try. Here's what I found...

The frustrating parts

Many sites straight up don't work, and of those ~20% show a message about requiring Javascript to function, the rest leave you in limbo.

Of these, some make sense given their purpose, and for others it's just baffling why they're built that way.

One site containing an article had some coloured blocks and no text, but clicking the Firefox reader mode presented the otherwise invisible article.

It's a shame Mastodon doesn't return the contents of a toot when directly linked to, but it does at least let you know directly that it needs Javascript.

The PEBKAC part

After a few days, I forgot about it, and ocassionally landed on a new site, or one of my own self-hosted services I'd not visited in a while and thought something was wrong with my Internet. The pink (instead of the usual grey) blocked resource counter in the uBlock extension is a good, but not always consistent reminder of this.

The good parts

Many sites mostly work, and are even improved. All those data sharing consents, social login prompts, giant begging overlays and demands to register, "this is your last free article", etc just stop existing. News sites especially are much improved, usually at the cost of non-working embedded videos and articles where they've tried to do fancy presentation tricks. And clicking around just feels snappier.

And then there's the satisfaction of all the sites that work just fine where you see that uBlock has blocked Javascript and know that whatever it was, it probably wasn't there to improve your experience.

In conclusion

Parts of the web are greatly enhanced by turning Javascript off. Sometimes it's annoying having to do three extra clicks every time you visit a new site that doesn't function without it.

For me, it's worthwhile, so I'm going to stick with it.

¹ With apologies for not crediting the blog, I can't recall it now, and because the post was entirely unrelated, I've not been able to find it again. But you can take a look here, where the same code is running. Just click away to another tab for a moment.