written on Monday, July 1, 2013
A few days ago Mozilla finally removed some options from their control panel. The one I am most happy about is the removal of the “Disable JavaScript” checkbox. This goes hand in hand with an earlier blog post by Alex Limi about Checkboxes that kill your product. If you have not read that link, do it now.
My immediate response to change of removing the switch was: “Thank god, that should have happened ages ago”. When I was happily tweeting this I got some responses about how I can support such a step in the browser that removes features and restricts a user's freedom. Instead of replying to each and every tweet I figured I might just write down my thoughts on that topic.
I believe there are two reasons why some people want to disable JavaScript: the feeling of extra privacy and improving page speeds. There are two main problems with that: none of those things are solved by disabling JavaScript categorically. The better solution to that are add-ons maintained by people that block out the right JavaScript and let everything else through.
The reason for that is that a user cannot reliably decide on if the JavaScript is necessary or not. There is this general understanding among some more technically skilled people that a website should always work without JavaScript. This might have been true a few years ago, but nowadays that is impossible to do.
Some applications now are written as frontends to APIs and the application does not provide any rendering on the server side besides a nice error message that the website requires JavaScript. Worse than that though, some websites just assume that JavaScript is actually activated. In some cases they might have one landing page that does a nice fallback to give you an error message if JavaScript is missing, but when it deep links you to a page that goes away.
It's a great day for a web developer when we can finally assume that a browser will have JavaScript running. Many modern web applications can be much more performant because they take advantage of JavaScript. User interfaces that depend on JavaScript have much better abilities to make it enjoyable for a user.
I agree that the particular case of a page breaking entirely is not that bad because the technical user that disabled it will quickly realize that he or she should activate JavaScript again. Unfortunately there are cases where currently users are assuming that JavaScript is not necessary but is.
A good example for instance is payment handling on the internet. Unless you want to go through all the hoops of getting PCI compliance for your servers, you will have to deal with JavaScript payment gateways. Some are not even that nice and only give you a basic iframe to work with and you will need JavaScript hacks to make your redirects break out of the iframe.
In that particular case the base page of the store does not require JavaScript but once you go through a payment flow one step might require the execution of JavaScript for the transaction to not get stuck.
You don't get extra privacy by disabling JavaScript. I can fully track you even without JavaScript. At the same time I can enhance your browser experience through better written JavaScript code that allows me to do things with your browser that plain HTML does not allow.
Instead of having a global “disable JavaScript and cookies” flag we should instead invest more into things like tightly tuned browser extensions that intelligently remove obnoxious JavaScript from specific pages.
JavaScript is quickly becoming a huge part of modern web applications. We as developers should be happy that browsers go our way and make our life easier.