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Firefox 23 Makes JavaScript Obligatory
mikejuk writes "It seems that Firefox 23, currently in beta, has removed the option to disable JavaScript. Is this good for programmers and web apps? Why has Mozilla decided that this is the right thing to do? The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications. The idea is that if you provide lots of user options then users will click them in ways that aren't particularly logical. The result is that users break the browser and then complain that it is broken. For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways — ways that worry the end user. Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites. Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."
ActiveX was actually smart in the way that it executed fast native code instead of slow interpreted Javascript.
People seem to be forgetting that javascript can break a lot of accessibility readers. Everything about HTML, CSS, etc., was about separating content from layout. Javascript shits on that entire model, as does Java, ActiveX, and most other plugins.
That's because it was a shit model. Clear, yes, simple yes, all that useful for doing stuff, not so much.
Web developers should continue to create websites that don't require javascript, and we shouldn't be in such a hurry to move away from that.
99% of web development is done for someone else. If clients want to pay extra to accommodate the few people who won't use JS, that's up to the clients.
The promise of the internet was accessibility, the ability to freely share information, and to connect everything together.
This push towards app-ification of the internet, the W3C caving to DRM in HTML5... it's after the very heart and soul of the internet. The internet we built, as hackers, as creatives, as professors, academics, researchers, scientists... it's being gutted. And Firefox, the white horse of the "free" internet, in it's 11th hour of need, chooses this?
They should be ashamed.
Such hyperbole, you should write a sonnet. I do agree it was pointless and counterproductive of the FF team to remove the option though, and I'm a big fan of FF. It's not as though people were accidentally unchecking the javascript box as a regular event.