It’s surprising how the Web instantly becomes quieter and less crowded when you turn off JavaScript.
This is one of the experiments I’m doing right now, trying to reduce the amount of content I want to rea, to watch or to listen to. The experiment is quite simple to do: I turn off JavaScript by default and only turn it for a website if 1) that website doesn’t work without it and 2) I still really want to access its content.
It’s worrying to see how many websites will not work at all without JavaScript enabled. I mean, even websites whose content is mostly text and images, aka static content and not very complex websites that should easily work without any script at all.
I think the reasons to rely so heavily on scripts are obvious. Laziness, everyone using the same tools as every one else. Advertisement money, in order to get advertisers to pay to place their ads on one websites one needs to have good analytics of their users and to get that one needs scripts, scripts are also often used to display the ads themselves.
Not allowing their content to be accessed without javascript is the website owner decision, not mine. The only decision I’m left with when this happen is to tell if this website content is worth the hassle of me re-enabling JavaScript and then reloading the page? So far, I’ve come to realize it’s often not worth it. Helping me realize I may not be that willing to read, listen or watch whatever it was I clicked on.
I will see where this goes, and if I can use the Web like that but, so far, I quite like how simple it is to use and how it instantly and completely removes a lot of what I would have otherwise put aside, kept open in a new tab, so I could read it ‘later’.
Some websites will work fine without scripts.
Published: 2025/07/29