Protip: in Safari you can assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle javascript (Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts -> [+] -> Application: "Safari" Menu Title: "Disable JavaScript" Shortcut: "Cmd+Shift+J". >90% of websites immediately become massively more pleasant and you can quickly toggle it on when actually needed.
For mobile devices, easiest way is to use two different browsers (one with JS disabled).
I presume this toggle applies to all windows and tabs. As an example, if some page uses a meta refresh tag to periodically refresh it and also has JS (which wasn’t loaded before), the JS would get loaded at a future point when it’s enabled through this option (though it may be for some other tab in focus that the user enabled it for)?
A per tab setting that remembers the JS enabled state would be very useful, with the default being JS disabled.
Yeah, it's global, and unfortunately I believe that Apple has gimped extensions so something like NoScript is no longer possible. If you need granularity or whitelisting of domains, I'm afraid you need another browser. On the glass half full side, being a global switch means it's less mental overhead – you have a single additional modal bit instead of O(tabs).
We've been through the blacklisting argument numerous times: spam, viruses, adware, malware, spyware, browser adblocking, etc.
It ... ultimately doesn't scale. The black-hat namespaces are too large, and treating as TOFU eventually proves untenable.
Advanced features -- anything beyond rendering basic HTML, and I'd be quite prepared to argue for a very limited subset of that -- should be expressly prohibited unless enabled.
The trick is to make enabling reasonably painless and consequence-free (e.g., enable into a sandbox). There are still the problems of users gratuitously enabling anything and everything (especially when prompted through website notifications, pop-ups, phishing and vishing social engineering attacks, etc.), as well as the problem of largely invisible second and higher-order effects.
But the key is to cut down on the effectiveness of such methods, to impose costs on websites for employing them, and to make black-hat attacks through these too expensive by reducing the herd susceptibility to the attacks (the unbocking would have to occur on a one-at-a-time case-by-case basis, e.g., it's expensive and has limited scalability).
I don't think we'll actually see this for another 5-10 years (my usual sane-suggestion take-up lead time, it seems), but It Would Certainly Be Nice To See.
I’ve recently been experimenting with having JS off by default on Brave. Many sites that I don’t regularly use or have an account/relationship with are much more pleasant without JS. There may be some visual breakage in some cases, but I’m there for the main content, which is mostly fine.
I had experimented with NoScript long ago, but found it a bit more cumbersome at that point because (then, before the uBlock days) I couldn’t really judge which scripts were necessary and which weren’t. I’m going to try it again.
One big plus with disabling JS is that all those ad blocker blockers and other annoying popups just don’t even appear, and that adds to a better experience.
I have JS blocked on some domains because of popups/other annoyances which make getting to the content a hassle. In those cases it's the exact opposite.
