I have some pretty popular personal web app and I still get angry e-mails from people using Windows XP that my site is broken and I am terrible developer for making broken websites.
I wonder how they even manage to browse web daily. Or they have to send daily hate mail for developers...
also, even the fastest updating browsers, Firefox and Chrome, take several months to move most users to a new version. There's a spread across a few versions tapering at about 3 or 4 back but current minus 1 is gonna cut off double digit percentages of users. Minus 2 or 3 would be reasonable for someone being aggressive and lazy, but 1 is kind of obscene (or bullshit.)
Only supporting the very latest browsers is basically a "works on my machine" attitude. That's lazy.
It means not supporting 11% of iPhone users and 18% of iPad users [0]. That's aggressive.
Adoption of evergreen browsers is also slower than that. Chrome 124 was released this week and even though 123 has been out for a month, the majority of desktop users are still on 122.
I make these talking points because I hate javascript as a developer. I won't ever bother listing all the reasons why, because they are so well known. I'll actively repeat these points ad nauseum in every meeting if you have this attitude with me on the team. To me, JS is a terrible language to work with, but I will make it about the user. You will lose this argument with the boss, because he doesn't care about languages, he cares about more users. So you can fold your arms and pout about it like this, and I will still win. Most of my apps work without JS and when someone tries to introduce a JS only feature, I make their lives miserable with the boss until they give up or quit their job.
as a user i like websites that are interactive and fast to respond. from my experience that works better if the site is done in a frontend framework and built to reduce roundtrips to the server.
i am on a slow connection, and when on hackernews for example on a slow day half the time the pages don't even load. so i sit there wanting to reply to a comment and i can't because first the reply link fails, and when it finally loads, submit fails.
had hackernews been written with a frontend framework, then i could click reply and submit without internet access, and the page could store my comment until internet is back and send it without me having to babysit it.
even just plain reading would would be better. with js new comments could be loaded in the background and they could be added to the page and marked as new without reloading the whole page. a much smoother experience than having to wait for a reload.
i don't know what kind of sites you are building. maybe in your domain this kind of example doesn't apply, but claiming that javascript is bad for users across the board is just plain nonsense. most users do not care whether something is done in js or not. they care that it functions well, and there are cases where javascript provides the better functionality. (submitting this comment took 1.3 seconds + another 300ms to load the updated page. and that's fast. with js it could happen in the background.)
> had hackernews been written with a frontend framework, then i could click reply and submit without internet access, and the page could store my comment until internet is back and send it without me having to babysit it.
Which websites do this? I have never seen nor would expect such a behaviour. Would you expect it to still post if you close the tab? What if you close the tab, but open some other page on HN? Would you expect to see it in your profile?
> even just plain reading would would be better. with js new comments could be loaded in the background and they could be added to the page and marked as new without reloading the whole page. a much smoother experience than having to wait for a reload.
So when you’re on a slow (and possibly traffic-limited) connection you would want the site to hog the channel with update-fetching? Loading the new comments, shifting everything as you read it? This might be OK for linear flat comments, but for discussion trees this just sounds like a nightmare, again - who does this?
new comments don't need to appear automatically, they just could be preloaded so when i click to see them, they appear instantly.
if you have a fast connection then it is hard to imagine how grating it is that every click takes a second or two to resolve.
i hate waiting for stuff to load. when reading hackernews i frequently reload the page to get the new comments. and that always takes more time than i am comfortable with. it takes long enough for me to often end up focusing on something else. preloading comments does not take much bandwidth. less than reloading the whole page. even if i end up not reading the new ones. and it doesn't have to happen more than once a minute. maybe even less.
stackoverflow is another example that could be improved. it hides some of the comments under each answer, and when i click to reveal them it takes 1-2 seconds for them to show up. i don't know why they do that. they could load all the comments at once and hide some of them so that they'll show up instantly when i click.
I’m with you. On the Internet today, a web browser is a thing that runs JS. Clients without it are HTTP browsers. Given that no browser maker has shipped that as a default config in what, like 20 years?, that ship has sailed.
JS came out a year before CSS for Pete’s sake. It just turned 28. It’s finishing its residency and can rent cars. I get why people didn’t like it nearly 30 years ago. I didn’t because it didn’t run well on the Amiga I had back then. But complaining about it today makes me imagine someone complaining about “why don’t these so-called ‘web’ sites gracefully fall back to table layout for those of us who can’t or won’t use CSS?” I understand the fundamental difference. I just don’t think it matters anymore.
Because sometimes analogies are convenient, although imperfect. Close up, sure, JS is running random code on your computer and CSS is a non-executable description of a page’s appearance. Those are very different. Farther away, they’re both fundamental technologies of the modern web that most new things are built on, and disabling them breaks a huge portion of the web.
And sometimes analogies lead you astray like in this case of comparing the age of some tech to biological age or random code (which btw also breaks plenty of the web) and styling
I don't understand. Why not build most of the functionality in HTML + CSS and use JavaScript only for interactivity and "real time"?
Hacker News is a very good example of that done right. I have JavaScript disabled and I can use the site just fine. The only thing I can't do is collapse comment threads.
The answer is no. Absolutely not.
If you do not have javascript then I don’t want you as a user. I don’t care why. Javascript or no service.