If they serve their own JS from their own servers, let it be. Others (Facebook connect, GAnalytics an Twitter seems to be _everywhere_): walk away.
This obviously renders most of the sites to bare HTML due to the excessive and unneeded use of CDNs, and is a massive pain to use for the first weeks, but after a while the whitelist gets you to a friendly web level.
uBlock also runs in the background, just in case things leak through, or I quickly want to check something and I need to turn Policeman off.
If you use a modern browser you probably don't need the polyfills anyway, so why are you concerned about blocking them?
While not necessarily related to privacy, I've found sites where blocking self-served JS creates a better browsing experience because it gets rid of annoying effects and things like scrolljacking.
I wonder how much JavaScript is only being used to produce a small number of common effects. In other words, how necessary is it really for sites to execute arbitrary code?
Maybe we have reached the point where browsers should implement the top 10-20 effects in standard ways (that of course the user can choose to override). That would make it feasible for many web sites to avoid JavaScript entirely and still produce the effects they want, and let us move away from this “execute arbitrary remote code by default” aspect of web pages.
HTML5 has been going in exactly this direction re: form inputs (@autofocus, @required) but, yes, I agree that it would be nice to extend that to, for example, some of the core ui interactions present in frameworks such as bootstrap.
We can already do a bunch of effects that used to be done with JS using CSS alone (transition, animations, etc.).
Most of the JS that we do on websites those days is really helpful for the end user and are the result of the recommendation of UX specialists. (form management, navigational help, async loading of content, preloading content, front-end browser geolocalisation, better responsive for mobile, etc.)
Agree, using Firefox with noscript visit 80% of sites are 4-15 times faster than chrome on load time for me. If a site demands to load a lot of js scripts from others, I see it as a huge warning sign.
Actually the web doesn't look too bad without javascript. It's not only safer, but you get no annoying pop ups, no text moving as you read it, etc. You basically get raw HTML+CSS.
Except when some idiot thought that he needed to create a complex SPA to render a blog article. But is the opinion of such an idiot really worth reading?
With uBlock you rely on someone manually maintaining a blacklist of domains. So it's only as safe as this person is quick to update its list and your uBlock to load the new lists.
There is zero reason to require javascript to display a few paragraphs of text. You might enhance it with javascript but that wouldn't be a problem when viewed without. The blogs designed by an idiot I am referring to are blogs that will display a white page with javascript disabled.
I mean, if your day-to-day tasks are as basic as reading some text, than carry on. But if you're doing anything reasonably complicated or modern, it just won't work.
Chrome has a convenient way to add exemptions. I wish they had slightly richer features, like temporary exemptions or exemptions for first party scripts only.
- an adblocker
- javascript disabled
- addins disabled (click to play)