Stop using JavaScript

… for everything.

Yeah, sorry for this click bait title, but it's getting annoying. Don't get me wrong, I like JavaScript and am impressed what some crazy webdevs can accomplish with it.

So what's the problem?

Some time ago I switched to the awesome browser Brave and eventually switched off the execution of JavaScript. Exactly. No more JS while browsing, except for some pages where it is really needed. This is a great experience, as a lot of useless crap is done with JS and I highly recommend to test this way of browsing out.

But there start the problems. I stumble across a lot of sites where I have to enable JavaScript to see some static content.

Static content? WHY?

Why do I have to enable JS for static content? Some pages seem to load images via JS, some don't show any content at all. This is not just annoying for a small minority of people like me, who opted to disable JavaScript, but also for all those people, who are not so lucky to have high bandwidth connections and state-of-the-art browsers with all kinds of fancy internet-stuff. If you don't care about those categories of visitors, then you should at least care about your websites performance, which will be greatly improved if all unnecessary JavaScript is removed.

So please: Make sure your site and it's content can be viewed without JavaScript. Look at it as a great starting point to add additional, JS-based extensions, which make the site fancier.

And if you have a fancy application, which absolutely needs JavaScript to display its content, please use the noscript tag to display a short message JS is needed. Don't just have the user look at a blank page.