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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes