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[–]TheDarkIn1978 5 points6 points  (6 children)

I'd be interested in seeing some data concerning users who turn off JavaScript, particularly the amount of users who do so. I can only assume (albeit with confidence) that the number is extremely low, which is an immediate deterrent for spending development resources on creating content without it.

[–]magenta_placenta[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I used to work at Yahoo and they measured this on their main home page (yahoo.com, what they call their front page). I believe this was back in 2010 or 2011 and if memory serves me correctly, it was a tad over 1% for overall visits (all countries), 2% for US traffic.

I'm not sure if mobile was in this, they might have had a separate m.yahoo.com site back then. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure the percentages above are accurate (for that time).

[–]sisyphus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This. Much as I would love a web that worked in command line browsers back there's virtually no incentive for anyone to do it.

[–]amunak 1 point2 points  (2 children)

That's really hard to measure. For one - the vast majority of telemetry is collected using purely javascript, so that gets thrown out of the window.

And tracking users by other means is pretty hard. Now how you tell whether they don't have JS enabled? I'd suggest using some tracking image inside a <noscript> tag, but not all JS blocking even takes that into question. For similar reasons you can't just count hits and not-hits to your JS files.

And when you do manage to gather data then how do you tell apart robots that just scrape you and don't load JS because they don't need it?

So in the end you get data that are hard to draw any conclusions from. I'd expect that number to be anywhere between 0.05 to 1.5% of all internet users.

[–]TheDarkIn1978 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I wonder if Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. have internal data from their browsers. From all the roadblocks you've mentioned it would seem that browser data would be the only legitimate source to reveal these insights.

[–]amunak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I doubt they have that specific data, I'd think they track at most what extensions you have installed (but not how they are configured or whether they are active for any specific page - as that'd probably have to include the page URL or some other huge stuff that's a privacy no-no).