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Nine months almost without JavaScript

Posted on 2022-08-12

I have now been living about nine months almost without JavaScript, and I must say that turning off this technology, and also additionally cookies, improved my experience on the web by a lot.

How to block

This is probably the easiest question to answer, as it did not change at all compared to my first ever blog post here. As I have already left details in the mentioned post, I will leave it at that.

War against Cookies and JavaScript

The allowed sites

Using the web without JavaScript at all is sadly almost impossible. That is why I decided to allow some websites to have JavaScript or cookies enables. A website is only allowed on these lists if I trust them to not do something fishy. Currently, I have 12 allowed JavaScript and 9 allowed cookie URLs. Let's go over them:

University: This one should be pretty obvious
Git hosting services: I have four different git hosting services that I allow to execute JS (two are GitLab instances I am currently on, GitHub and SourceHut). I allow cookies for three out of four.
Mail: I use Protonmail (although I must say I am not too happy with it, but I am both too lazy to self-host and do not want to pay), which is 3 URLs (maybe just two as they have recently changed their URL?)
Rust: Two websites containing Rust documentation that I must allow JS on to search. I must honestly say that I hate having JS enabled here as both of these sites should in my opinion work fine without JS.
Nextcloud: My own hosted cloud instance I of course trust.
Weblate: Web translation service that is pretty nice but obviously requires JS+Cookies to login. I think I do not really need to interact with the service in the next month, so I may be able to cross that off the list.

You might now note that these are pretty many websites, but I would not say that this is the case. They are most definitely the websites I visit the most, but compared to the number of websites I visit daily, I think that this list is pretty acceptable.

Advantages

I would say that there are many great advantages to disabling JavaScript. First of all, there are most definitely privacy advantages, but I will not go into great detail about them. Another great thing is the lack of ads, which is probably better than any ad blocker out there. But I must say many ad blockers are doing a great job, so this is not too much of an advantage. But lastly, there are no cookie banners, because all of them are loaded exclusively using JavaScript. As all websites I allow using JavaScript do not have such banners, it means that I am never greeted by such a horrendous popup, ever. There are probably some blockers out there that may get some (maybe most) cookie banners, but they mostly hide them instead of disallowing everything.

Disadvantages

The most prominent disadvantage of all is of course that I need to access a site that wants JavaScript enabled. Most of the time, I do not even bother with such sites, go back to my search engine of choice and get that information from a website without JavaScript required. If no other site has the information I need, I open that website with my secondary browser of choice, Firefox, which has JavaScript enabled, where I am most of the time disappointed that even this website does not even have the required information and that I have wasted a few seconds of my time. Another disadvantage is that some websites also have a popup-like think warning you that this website requires JavaScript for some features, but as this popup is displayed without JavaScript, it is always less distracting than the cookie banners mentioned before.

How many sites work?

I am honestly surprised at how many sites actually work without JavaScript and cookies. Of course all the modern websites like YouTube, Instagram and so on break, but I am happy that they do as all of the time I stumble upon such links is a accident. But for almost all of the programming websites, programming help and so on, the web without JavaScript works perfectly fine.

Should you turn it off?

Maybe? As also mentioned in the previous post, disabling all cookies except for a few sites is something I would consider great without any disadvantages, but disabling JavaScript heavily depends on the types of websites you are on. Maybe turn it off for a day, see which websites break, and then decide if it is worth disabling JavaScript everywhere except for websites that broke.

I will definitely continue without JavaScript on my main browser for the future. Maybe, if one day I decide that I want a small peek into the hell that is the modern web, I might enable JavaScript for a day (or maybe a few minutes, depends on how long I can withstand cookie banners).

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