If you're worried about tracking, you can block ads and tracking scripts without disabling javascript. If you're worried about viruses, well, all I can say there is that in my experience and understanding, if you keep your browser updated, the odds of getting a virus via browser JS are exceedingly low. Doubly so if you're not frequenting sketchy sites.
I don't know, it seems to me like advice from a time before security was a priority for browser makers, and high-quality ad blockers existed. At this point, I really don't see the value.
Disabling Javascript makes most of this insulting crap go away, and sometimes it is the only way to read the content.
I swear I've had ones that popup as I move the mouse to close the tab.
Not to mention that a host of vulnerabilities were image related a few years back (one of the original rookits exploited a TGA bug).
> uBlock Origin
Honestly, this is the antivirus of the web. I helped my niece set up my old computer for Minecraft today, and she was explaining how her friend had installed viruses (adware, really) 3 times. Every one of those instances was caused by download link confusion for Minecraft mods. Disabling JavaScript isn't going to save you from being tricked into downloading shady software, only an adblocker will.
As a lover of old image formats and the security issues they can cause* this sounds fascinating, but some quick google searches don’t seem to surface what you are referencing. Can you share any more details?
* I once fell into discovering a memory disclosure flaw with Firefox and XBM images
IME, 9 times out of 10, web developers are using JS for non-necessary reasons. The user configurable settings of popular browsers make it easy to designate the small number of sites that actually require JS and keep JS disabled for all other sites. They anticipate that the user will not have one default JS policy for all websites. In other words, these web browsers do not expect that all users should just leave JS enabled/disabled for every website, they acknowledge there will be situations where it should be disabled.
However as we all know most users probably never change settings. Doubtful it is a coincidence that all these browsers have JS enabled by default.
The number of pages I visit that actually require JS for me to retrieve the content is so small that I can use a client that does not contain a JS interpreter. Warnings and such one finds on web pages informing users that "Javascript is required" are usually false IME. I can still retrieve the content with the use of an HTTP request and no JS.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of JS. It is nice to have a built-in interpreter in a web browser for certain uses. For example, it makes web-based commerce much easier. However, I believe the largest use of JS today is to support the internet ad industry. Without having automatic execution of code by the browser without user review, approval or even interaction, I do not believe the internet ad "industry" would exist as we know it.
I believe this not because I think having a JS or other interpreter is technically necessary, but because these companies have become wholly reliant upon it.
That's why disabling JS stopsa remarkable amount of ads and tracking.
I browse the web with JS disabled by default. If I encounter a site that has trouble with that, I enable it for that site until I can determine if it is worth leaving it enabled, which usually means at some point I'll be back there again and need it on.
For the most part, it is a superior experience to what I was seeing before with just an ad blocker. The most noticeable thing about it is probably how many images simply don't load because developers lean on JS for loading and scaling them.
Heydon is a developer, and an influencer of developers. He's saying: web development is now absolutely obsessed with JavaScript, and it in no way has to be. The basics, HTML, CSS. That's what's important.
Javascript is a privacy and security nightmare. It's almost equivalent to downloading and silently executing untrusted code on your machine. I say "almost" because Javascript code is virtualized and sandboxed. Though I have no doubt people have already discovered vulnerabilities that enable code to break out of the sandbox.
AFAIK, JavaScript the language has neither privacy nor security issues of "nightmare" level.
> It's almost equivalent to downloading and silently executing untrusted code on your machine.
No it's not. The code is run in a VM, which is run in a browser. So, the code is limited in doing things to the browser, which itself is limited in what it can do to your computer (files and whatnot). So it's not at all like running untrusted code "on your machine".
> I say "almost" because Javascript code is virtualized and sandboxed.
It's virtualized (in the browser) such that all the code will run almost the same on different browsers and chipsets. Again, the browser code is what keeps the computer safe from any code it runs, including CSS code or other VMs it may use, like Java or Flash. Also the OS keeps the computer safe from the browser (or at least it should).
So, no it's not JavaScript that is the boogeyman here.
this is not about how "you" do things, It is more about how it should be done! js is almost never provides want I want when I browse, I expect to get some information! I am not on the circus looking for adventures!
people who love to use javascript to prove that they have some kind of taste about how ux etc. I think these people should use some other platform for people who are insterested in show bussniss. think of this as public transportation is designed based on who the driver is that day! is this sound ok to you? do you understand this one?
web is just connection to other people, not a tool for others to bully you just bein' smart about "the code" they wrote is brilliant!
Things like this are seriously creepy: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/mouse-recorder/
eg: hotjar.com sessioncam.com
Legitimate tools for measuring effectiveness of pages with little in the way of nefarious tracking afaics. Also very useful for replaying user errors/problems.
JS doesn't have any magic to it, location information is opt-in, but your IP is a much better advertising identifier.
Canvas fingerprinting, WebGL fingerprinting, GPU, fonts etc etc etc.
Please, stop arguing, JS is a nightmare for privacy. Period
Citation needed?
How can I generate pages with dynamic content easily? Ideally with absolute minimal dependencies.
You still need Ajax (at least) for truly dynamic content. The bad news is that Ajax requires client-side JS. The good news is minimal Ajax functionality only takes about 30 lines of pure Javascript. The bad news is you will need to write those 30 lines yourself because every JS library is at least 100x bigger than that and packed with cruft you don't need.
My advice is to pretend React doesn't exist, learn Javascript, and write just the Javascript you need and no more.
With SSR, you need some component that's aware of every change, and that triggers those re-renders at sensible times (every render takes server resources). This all feels messy, compared to rendering just-in-time on the client-side.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11411982
[1] I once enabled JS on a site that claimed it would provide "a better experience", and was bombarded with a bunch of ads and other irritations that just made me turn it off again. It was not a "better experience".
I forget about the back button. By default, I always open links in new tabs which means back button has no data. Also, SPAs have hijacked the back button or just broken it completely, so I've been trained to not count on it behaving as expected. There's also mobile experience where getting to the back button itself is often painful after the UI hides navigation from you.
Otherwise, I am 100% in agreement. If a page is so user hostile to not making a friendly non-JS page, the tab gets closed
I really wish, even if it was an optional setting, browsers would copy the past history of the source tab when you did that. If it hit back in a tab I opened that way, I still want “where I got here from” not “stay here” or “new tab page" or especially “close the tab” (thanks a lot Android Chrome).
(I occasionally used it for curiosity, but found it too tedious in the long term. I have settled on CookieAutoDelete, which seem to address most tracking. Not many seem to run a completely server based fingerprint database.)
It's worth saying that most people don't even know what Javascript is, full stop. Weirdly enough my now mother does, but my younger sister doesn't - we now have a generation that has effectively grown-up post-smartphone, which is fascinating to me.
The other rule is that the JS is all hand-written. No frameworks or other dependencies.
A great way to make your browsing better is to disable 3rd party scripts by default and whitelist when needed, but <noscript> fails to work in those conditions.
I combine this with another ad blocker (Wipr) to block everything else.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2271/mac
If someone knows how to achieve the same on Linux for Chrome and Firefox, I'd love to hear it (browser plugins are a bit of a security and stability shitshow, so non-plugin solution would be preferred, all else being equal).
I think Chrome actually is fine although I don't know of a keybinding for it: Don't they still have a toggle right in the site menu (click the icon to the left of the URL to toggle all kinds of these things)?
In other news, possibly the best designed website of 2020: http://www.muskfoundation.org/
So how do I trace what Javascript is doing on my machine?
Generally mitmproxy gives a feeling what sites the browser talks too. And strace gives often a good feeling what a Linux binary does. But the browser is too big and complicated to read strace output in most cases.
Can anybody recommend a tool to look what Javascript code loaded by a certain page is doing?
Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Script/Debugger tab and have at it. It's just about as obtuse to use as a tool as gdb, but you'll see exactly what it does. Chrome dev tools has automatic formatting of the code, maybe firefox too. But you'll be stuck with shitty variable names if they been mangled. Although you could try http://www.jsnice.org/, I had variable luck with using it.
It would be interesting to have a browser tool that is like strace and you could filter by calls, so you can see exactly where window.navigator is being used for example, or localStorage.setItem. For now best you can do is searching for "navigator" which works, but can be minified/hidden away by coder as well.
Exactly, that's what I meant.
Almost all modern browsers have debug panels that will list all of the requests made by a page, assets cached, cookies and local db, and of course it's trivial to just view the source of a site and read the javascript if it isn't compressed.
Haven't really used the Javascript debugger, but my guess would be completely infeasible to follow everything a random "modern" Web site might do. And as you say some Javascript might be compressed or obfuscated. What I really would want is a somewhat higher level / more filtered approach: Like strace lets me just trace file operations for example.
I have no idea why they made the SVG image inline but the CSS style external, though. That same image is used on every page.
Here[1] is the link to disabling JS for a site in Chromium.
[1] chromium://settings/content/javascript
BTW, you probably want to move off of uM given gorhill has abandoned it in favor of uBO. (I converted all my rules to a mix of uBO dynamic rules for JS and static rules for everything else, except for cookies which I still use uM for because uBO can't manage them.)
BTW, the site works as expected with my Linux/Firefox/uMatrix setup... the inline scripts are disabled by default and I see the page content. I'm not sure why GP had issues.
Takes max 10 seconds, on any site. Can you do it in less than 10 seconds using that validator?
But my point was that the markup is invalid.
First, go to "Site settings" and disable it globally.
To make a site-wide exception, click on the icon in the address bar and enable it for the site there.
It used to be crippled and unusable, but they fixed it recently.
I also recommend Bromite on Android.
fetch("https://heydonworks.com").then(x => x.text()).then(x => {
var f = document.createElement("iframe");
document.body.append(f);
f.style.left = "0px";
f.style.top = "0px";
f.style.width = "100%";
f.style.height = "100%";
f.style.position = "absolute";
f.style.border = 0;
x = x.replace(/\<\/?noscript\>/gi, "");
x = x.replace(/\<script\>.*\<\/script\>/gi, "");
f.contentDocument.write(x);
});A good contrast with web pages which are not apps telling you "This app requires Javascript to run".
<meta name="noscript">
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
That's literally the only thing it did until I reconfigured my browser to access it. It's a misuse of `<noscript>` and it's completely unnecessarily intruding on how I use my own computer to access the content. I thought that was the kind of thing people here (especially the anti-JS people) frown upon.
My philosophy is: set a good example, make the benefit clear, and communicate with other devs who might not realize the horror show they’re sending down the wire/executing in their users’ browsers. But forcing people to figure out how to disable something increasingly hard to disable before they can even hear you is not good communication.
I only clicked the link because I was hoping there would be a regular site under default config and some special treat with JS disabled. Progressive enhancement. That would have been a clever and compelling execution.
Watch his videos. Check out his articles on A List Apart and in Smashing Magazine, among others. Pay attention, he's very thoughtful and you'll probably learn a lot.
Shows a banner "You Don't Need JavaScript to Run This Site (turn it off here)"
It's a response to all the "You Need JavaScript to Run This Site" banners we see everywhere even on plain text/image sites.
* Washington Post no longer has a paywall
* anandtech.com is seemingly unaffected, but tomshardware.com is very different (and less pushy)
* SoundCloud says "Oh no! | JavaScript is disabled | You need to enable JavaScript to use SoundCloud"
* nationalreview.com is broken -- I can only read a few paragraphs in a NR PLUS story, and there's no way to keep scrolling (I can read the article fine in another tab)
* An article I co-wrote, published in a Cambridge University Press journal, is now sans tables and figures, but the console reports no errors or exceptions.
An interesting experiment! Overall, it seems my internet experience is better without JS (but reading an academic article online is way worse).
As someone pointed out, there's a button on uBlock to disable it.
I didn't quite spend so much time on Firefox preferences but I didn't find the option. I'm sure it's there somewhere
You can open developer console, go into it's settings and look for Disable Javascript. Checking the box will disable JS and reload the page.
Would love to have heard that final talk!
I think it's a conflict between Tor trying to be mainstream as possible and Onions trying to reduce users attack vectors, JavaScript has been used against users on Tor.