Want to enjoy fast web browsing without ads, popups & tracking ? Just Disable Javascript
I don’t like story telling introductions, so I’ll get straight to the point : We’re wasting the web with Javascript.
If you’re reading this from a web browser, you probably had to dismiss several popups and wait for a script to slowly load a simple text content.
Here is a fact : you don’t need Javascript. The only case you really need it is if you’re building a User Interface for a real web app or tool, for features that go beyond reading text and posting simple content.
Here is another fact : when you’re building a website, you’re not building a user interface. The web browser IS the user interface. You’re designing a document, and all you need for this is HTML and CSS.
JS — and by JS I mean, JS frameworks and devs — JS didn’t keep its promise to bring us fast and nice web browsing experience. We put too much of it, and this required to put even more, and now we’re setting up complex dev environments and pipelines and JS apps just to display content fetched from a server, although JS isn’t necessary for this.
Want to check by yourself ? Disable JS on your mobile web browser for a week or two. You’ll see how pleasant it is to read newspapers and navigate through pages, get back without scrolling blocking lag, etc. Try NoScript on your desktop browser. Sure, some websites won’t work at all, but they should feel bad and guilty about this. Why can’t I browse a feed like Instagram’s without JS enabled ? It’s just a list of images, right ? Why would JS be required for this ?!
I could say this is my humble opinion, but I think it’s the hard truth. We could have stopped at simple Ajax requests, but we didn’t. Websites shouldn’t replace documents by code.
We can’t seriously say cookies and JS are used to improve user’s experience because it just wastes it. Tracking me like a weird guy would follow me everywhere in the streets and home to snitch and tell sellers what I did. Websites show me crap-heavy ads and ask me to download their app or subscribe to a newsletter. I came for content, and all I got was noise.
I’ve been browsing the web for years, and I’m too lazy to make proper measurements for it, but just try it for a week and you’ll re-discover the joy of fast and pleasant web-browsing, reading, etc.
Sure JS is helpful for a lot of useful features, for wysiwyg editors for examples. But even that : think about the energy and years and money spent (wasted) to create always more complex CMSs when we could have use a fraction of this to teach people how to write documents, in HTML or Markdown, and let the devs focus on more important stuff.
(Disclaimer : I’m a dev myself, and have coded a lot of stuff in JS, but I also avoided it whenever it wasn’t necessary.)
