Now it’s about four weeks after my post quitting JavaScript, so maybe it’s good time for some follow-up.

In short: there’s no way going back. My web experience have become so much better that the life before quitting JavaScript feels like a bad dream. I know, this sounds now like quitting some drug, or turning to some kind of religion, but I think I have something to back this up.

In case you didn’t read my previous post, here’s the bottom line: I basically profiled my web usage to find out what exactly I’m doing, and to find out all the sites truly requiring JavaScript. Turned out there’s not that many. Reddit, Youtube, Facebook and likes, just to mention few. For these sites, there’s a special treatment described in the post. For all other sites, I just brutally block execution of JavaScript with browser’s built-in mechanism, and that’s all.

So what happened to the bulk of my web browsing? It got better, it got much faster. If some random page refuses to load, I just ignore it, and to be honest, this doesn’t happen often.

Now why is it like this? One of the first and obvious explanations is that the web pages without JS simply gets trimmed out a bit. I don’t have any numbers, but I suppose lot of ads will be cut out, because obviously all data dynamically referenced by JS simply won’t be loaded. Then of course the JS will burn up some CPU cycles and memory, and the browser tends to bloat up to the point of crashing very fast. I guess if the browser is allowed, the JS will eventually eat up all the memory in known universe. Now this bad behavior is mostly gone, and I can have as many tabs I want, as long as I want, and the browser still stays relatively slim and responsive.

For more convincing argument, I recommend to take a look at excellent presentation Website Obesity Crisis by Maciej Cegłowski: