Surprisingly well, from my own experience. It can even increase your productivity and dicrease distractions: it blocks most ads, suppresses annoying "interactive" features, bans participation in most time-wasting sites (eg. facebook) while still allowing browsing. And of course security.
For the very few domains I deem absolutely necessary, I can always whitelist them.
It sounds like the problem is you're spending your time on adversarial websites. Give JS to a skillful developer who shares your goals, and they'll use it to make the website better.
Not altruism (except occasionally), incentive alignment. Websites that don't otherwise profit from you are incentivized to be as you describe; websites that profit from your happiness (paid directly, funded for a purpose, a generosity, etc) aren't.
Actually I don't. I never had any account on FB for example, but once in a blue moon I get to visit a public FB page (like a recent blog post posted on HN recently), and having JS disabled let me browse it without worries.
How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions?
My personal tastes tend to go not too far off this kind of design:
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
If this hypothetical developer is really sharing my goals then he'll use the <noscript> tag, and I'll be happy enough with HTML/CSS.
For text-heavy sites, which are the ones I use the most, JS adds nothing I want: tracking? 3rd-party ads? lazy-loading? comments via disqus? sharing to social media? Thanks, but not for me.
> How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions?
devdocs.io uses JS to make an essentially-static website much faster to load and navigate. HN lets you vote without reloading the page. Shopping carts. Webmail. Google Maps. Rich text editors. Navigating around Spotify while the music keeps playing. Feedback on forms without clearing or changing something. Keeping a table of contents in sync with what you're viewing. Keeping changing data correct, like feeds, whether a service is up, whether you're signed in. Chat. Video calls.
And areas not yet widespread. AMP's speed (which would be inoffensive, I think, if intra-site). Layouts more advanced than CSS can express, like a newspaper's or the positioning of plaques at museums. Even smarter data compression for repetitive content.
And areas we're just now getting the tech for, like 3D simulations and peer-to-peer networking.
> How can a skillful JS developer make the site better for me when I want to avoid ANY extra features and distractions?
I don't know if I qualify as a skillful JS developer, but I run a website displaying pictures that works correctly without Javascript.
However, Javascript makes this website way faster, smoother and easier on the connection by downloading only the moving parts when clicking on a link, carefully preserving history so back/next works as if this script did nothing. When Javascript is disabled, an ugly white flash appears when navigating between some pages and rendering is just slower, even though it remains decent (my code is minimalist anyway…)
When leaving the page of a picture to come back to the album it is in, scroll position is restored. This is impossible without Javascript. History Back button is not sufficient: you might have looked at 10 pictures before coming back to the album. Sure, you can still ask your browser to come back 10 pages ago, but this is less convenient than just clicking on a cross.
It also help dimension images correctly, which I could not manage to do using pure CSS, unfortunately.
No Javascript tracker is present. You want Javascript enabled on this website because it helps using less resources and makes things easier to use. This is a 9 KB Javascript file that gets compressed to 3 KB and served using HTTP2 only once, so this is basically a null cost when considering how much a picture weighs (~ 100KB). And this is free software, for the sake of it.
But you cannot know this on random websites. Problem is, Javascript is not used like this in general. Unfortunately for websites like this one, disabling Javascript by default is still a reasonable thing to do.
Worse, visitors of this website that disable Javascript won't be aware of that, because things pretty much work as expected and I don't display a warning message.
Pretty easily. Just temp whitelist if it's really needed (ie, a bank or government website). Otherwise close the tab and avoid the waste of time that 'web app' sites represent.
> Indeed. I wonder how they can get anything done. (Other than posting on HN itself, that is)
It's very straightforward. I allow javascript on the sites that I trust to run javascript - in a protected environment. There are tons of ways to do this.
I see how long other's computers take to render simple pages, and I just shake my head.
Well, 99% of the javascript/web is more about distraction, advertising and tracking than about getting anything done, and the other 1% is a small number of high-frequency sites that can be selectively white-listed.
Plus my bandwidth is a fraction of others and browser responsiveness shoots up...
I think you may have it arse-backwards when it comes to productivity...
With the exception of a couple of sites, I rarely turn on javascript.
(There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.)
About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap2it until last week, but have not yet found an alternative. Anyone have any suggestions?
Perhaps, but like the grandparent post said, one can find other online stores that don't require JavaScript.
Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them.
If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS.
I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.
...as if much of HN's userbase doesn't already do that.