this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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I used to be able to browse the web happily with JS disabled. It started to get worse about 10 years ago and really bad about 6 years ago and EXTREMELY bad over the past year or two.
And I get it, it’s because of all the scrapers constantly fucking everything up and needing to be blocked. But still. The internet is unusable. All so the likes of Gemini or Claude or Deepseek can generate unlimited amounts of spam and slop.
Say thank you to React for popularizing rethinking everything webdev for the sake of why the fuck not.
It's not because of the scrapers though. It's probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can't do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren't as nice.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes
It's not my taste. I am a software engineer and have to build these things. there are features you just can't do with out JavaScript. Features that are expected from modern apps.
If you need a basic form you don't need JavaScript but if you want to change anything on the page after it's already loaded you do. That's a huge limitation for any kind of app.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager (in the browser) told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn't need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page "nice" anymore.
Just because people use JavaScript for bad things doesn't mean it's not also necessary for the other things though
Thank you for this invaluable insight, it was truly foolish of me to think that javascript is just silly and the entire webdev industry that's based on it is just dummy dumb
It's also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can't realistically do the "prove you are human bits", which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a 'No-JS' challenge, but it's super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even 'proof of work', but increasingly the proof of work isn't considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
I tried no script for a few days but it was so frustrating that the majority of websites just flat out didn't work I had to get rid of it.
you can set permanent rules. Its very much active protection as in you have to actively fiddle with it when going to new sites, which also makes you more aware how much stuff they are running. So many sites load like 20 different things but need only 1 or 2 to function flawlessly.
Imo, it would be scary to browse without noscript, even with ublock on. For me its kind of like first line of defence, with ublock I can pretty safely test out what is needed for website to work and what isnt without worrying too much. Everything being blocked by default makes it more safe and if some website turns out to be really bad, i can set it as untrusted so i remember it later too if it appears again or if i go there again because i forgot.
And if I get really annoyed with fiddling with some website i want to work and which doesnt seem that threatening, i just set it temporarily all allowed.
You just have to go into no script and approve the parts that make the website function but not the ad stuff. Its a pain when you first land on a site but the browser remembers what you have allowed. So overtime you get back to normal working sites, minus ads and tracking stuff
Until you distro hop and realize that the noscript plugin migrates with your firefox profile, but not the website settings you've set up.
Aren't those stored in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/.
That would have been helpful yesterday, but thank you none the less. I'd already wiped the drive and swapped to cachyos when I realized I had to redo noscript.
Ouch, you are painfully correct.
Yeah, fortunately memory serves fairly well as to which sites are necessary across multiple webpages, and which ones can be universally blocked.