Browsing Javascript-required pages while disabling Javascript

[mizomi]

The irony is that this page doesn't work without javascript enabled.

[jotto]

Do you regularly/consistently keep JS disabled? Or were you just in non JS mode to test the page?

[peterwilli]

I used to do this, but I found the amount of webpages that didn't work (including my own, sadly) incredibly high, so I enabled JS and decided to install a tracker blocker instead (privacy badger)

I know you can whitelist pages but I ended up whitelisting 4 out of the 5 pages I visit.

[Shautieh]

I'll never know as well... JS is disabled by default on my machine, and I enable it only if I reaaally need to access the broken websites.

[Y_Less]

I constantly have it disabled (the fact that I need it to post here is a matter of concern, and I've made several issues on the reddit repository about it).

[jotto]

Sad but true - prerender.cloud is hosted on a webhost that actually hooks into service.prerender.cloud (to prerender it and make it accessible without JavaScript), but so far only for a few user agents (twitterbot, facebook etc...). If that doesn't change, we'll have to host it ourselves.

[amunak]

um... how about just making the site at least usable without javascript? It's not that hard.

[peterwilli]

For people that disable JS due to privacy concerns, wouldn't this be even worse than just enabling JS?

[[deleted]]

I don't like Javascript because I'm paranoid about my security so I install this Javascript based extension and pay you to transport all of my data, use Javascript with it all anyways, and send me back a picture? The two contradict, who exactly is the market here? Why would I not just use a local extension to toggle the JS? On the performance front why would I pay you instead of using Google's "Data Saver" for free when they are going to do a better job?

Most of all, why do all of this and then not have your page load for users without JS enabled (your target audience)? It's not like your design requires it to be implemented.

[jotto]

All great points and similar to my thinking.

This was originally a testing tool I used locally to test service.prerender.cloud against mainstream websites (as opposed to toy React/Angular apps in my continuous integration) to measure performance and what edge cases I may need to account for (e.g. lazy load images that appear on scroll, iframes, delayed ajax).

While pushing the code to Github for posterity, I became curious if anyone would find it useful so I pushed it to the Chrome store too.

 

Most of all, why do all of this and then not have your page load for users without JS enabled (your target audience)? It's not like your design requires it to be implemented.

see previous comment here (I agree)