Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
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Btw it’s possible to fingerprint people with JavaScript disabled. I found this article explaining and demonstrating if you’re curious.
Yeah, it’s not impossible, but it’s much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox’s privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here’s also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It’s been a year or so since I’ve gone down this rabbit hole, but what I remember, the more you block ads and tracker, the more unique your browser becomes, and the more fingerprintable it is.
Tor’s approach is to make every instance if the tor browser look as identical as possible to websites. But Tor is pretty niche. If Apple did the same with Safari, you would be an identical device in a match larger pool of devices.
I think Apple has taken some measures, but not as well as Tot has.
These are also just fun:
I also use Mojeek when I want a (serious) different set of results that I’m not getting from those pulling from google, bing, etc. It’s not the best but it’s getting better over time.
thanks a lot for mentioning us; you can send us in searches which could be better via the submit feedback button on results pages, if you’d like :D
I love that society is basically stratifying into groups based on tech knowledge - it all seems very Cyberpunk.
As someone with technical knowledge sometimes I get locked out of things because I block ads or refuse Javascript. For instance, I had to turn off my pihole so I could sign into my Microsoft account to play Minecraft. Or the times I encounter a website that breaks on Firefox.
If you’re getting locked out of those things, those things are not worth using
This is my stance.
Like, the cost of doing business is jumping through stupid ass hoops. If you don’t want to do that, don’t join? Or be okay with doing funky ass work arounds.
I’m pretty sure my divorce lawyer’s document management system is something that’s worth using even if I have to use chrome and disable ad blocking.
You cant just make it work?
Unfortunately not. Some things just don’t work on Firefox no matter how hard you try.
What did she use? Chrome?
I mean, of course, but that’s a little out of the realm of your control. Minecraft isnt lol
Sometimes people need to play minecraft with their nephews or nieces. Trust me, it’s necessary and very much worth it.
I play Minecraft with my kids, but I don’t use a Microsoft account for it. Just PollyMC and host my own server.
The Microsoft Minecraft login thing is getting pretty insane.
The worst part was that it just showed a black window, with no controls or indication of what was wrong. Thankfully this sort of thing happens so often my first reaction is to turn off my pihole for a few minutes.
The more technology pervades society the more pronounced this will get. The sheer helplessness of people when faced with problems that seem trivial to some is scary. Especially when you see people losing final theses or critical work related data because they never learned about backups.
Add to that tech companies trying to hide the concept of a file system, and it seems like this is by design to sell more shit.
Yeah, obscuring and abstracting away the atomic units of the system is a classic.
On the other hand self-education has never been easier, and there are open source alternatives of pretty much everything.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t ;)
By the way, in my browser, the title of this post shows up as
Google now requires Javascript in c/mildlyinfuriatingwhich shocked me a little.
i use startpage ;)
Sundar Pichai is the admin for this community, didn’t you know?
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A large majority of modern web applications are built with Javascript… Both frontend and backend. You do still have a large majority of websites using plain HTML or PHP, with some features requiring JS to function (modals, realtime stats, data input, etc).
You also have alternative languages like Java or C# (and more), but also may use bits of JS on the frontend to drive functionality.
You can bet that the majority of websites you visit nowadays will use some form of JS, unless it’s a static webpage to display basic information.
A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here’s a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:
The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.
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JS is like a disease where it does not need to be. I would honestly welcome an Internet alternative that was all web 1.0 (with up-to-date security updates and methods). There’s good uses for it in interactive websites that provide cloud services, but most of it is fud and breaks the whole notion of HTTP GET URLs you can just share and cache.
Htmx does use javascript under the hood, but just makes it so the developer can use html markdown for more a more interactive environment that’s driven sever side. So the initial page load should render, but UI elements might not work as intended.
htmx is more a move back to REST as it was originally defined (aka not json backend).
They’re also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won’t even need htmx/JS/etc, it’ll just be what your browser does by default
Jesus Christ no.
As a web developer, nooooooo.
You’re still using Google search?
Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I’ll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can’t shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.
Use the bangs in DDG, eg !g asks DDG to search google
I use ddg. But that just uses Microsoft’s bing on the backend right?
Unless you use the bangs. !g tells it to use google
I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
A lot of websites are react which doesn’t function without JavaScript. It’s a more powerful tool for web dev and can be a better experience for the user if used right.
Great. If that was their reason, they could explain that. But they didn’t and that’s my beef.
But since you seem to be tech savvy, you also already know why they don’t explain which great features of react they want to use on this page. And we all already know it’s not for the user’s benefit. It’s for money they receive from data mining every minute of our lives.
In google’s case, you might be right. However in general what are you expecting the website to say? An explanation of why react was chosen over other languages? Otherwise the reason you have to enable JavaScript on a react website is because the site doesn’t work without it. I see that like complaining that your gas light on your car doesn’t provide an explanation as to why gas is required for it to run.
If you are curious why a lot of sites use languages like react instead of plain html, there are a few reasons. Prior to react like languages, web servers would generate the page, send it to you, and then anytime you interacted with the site it would send you a whole new page to display. I.e. if you opened a popup for uploading a file, it would send you a whole new page to display which is why older sites flicker on basically any interaction. Newer sites that use things like React are downloaded once. It basically downloads the code to make the website and then runs entirely on your machine. The benefit to this is that if you sort a list, open a drop-down, open a popup to download a file, etc. it all happens on your computer instead of some remote server. No need to wait for a server to respond or download a new page, it can update that specific part of the page instead. Some sites are even fully functional offline because of this which is really cool in my opinion.
This makes a far better user experience because everything is instant and doesn’t trigger page reloads on every interaction with the site.
It’s good for developers because it allows code reusability and vastly increases what you can do. Many of the critical features I have on my site are not possible without JavaScript/React. I actually first developed the site using the old style and changed it over to React because of those limitations.
Google could have updated their site to one of these languages to open up new possibilities in what they can do on their site. That or they might be making it more consistent with their other products for maintainability reasons. I find it unlikely that the people who have JavaScript turned off are a large enough portion of the population for them to care about their data but I could be wrong.
Because they dont need to
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
BOW TO YOUR MASTERS, AND SUCK OUR DICK!!!
I remember 10 years ago looking at a calculator app in the android app store, and seeing the permissions. And thinking “WHY THE FUCK DOES A CALCULATOR NEED MY LOCATION, AND ACCESS TO MY PHONE CONTACTS???”
Fuck THAT.
All those years, and I still have no explanation why some apps want my browsing history.
What dick? pretty sure it’s fallen off from all the STD’s.
I found out yesterday the Samsung system camera app will not function without “Nearby Devices” permissions. Utterly ridiculous.
It needs to be able to tell nearby devices to “say cheese”, so they can blink their LEDs prettily before you take a photo.
Probably because 99.999% of users already use JS and dedicating a web page to it is already more work than they needed to put into it
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
I think it’s just to avoid explaining why, and how they harvest your data. That said, I also hate how a lot of errors of the big corpo are just like “This site has an error” no error-code, no further feedback what to do etc.
I’m just kind of surprised Google still worked without JS up until now. The people who don’t have Javascript enabled are such a tiny sliver of market share that Google may as well serve them a broken web page.
I think Duckduckgo still supports searching without Javascript, though you may need to wait for a meta refresh when you use the standard search engine integration, so make sure you use the right URL in your search engine settings.
<form method="GET" action="https://duckduckgo.com/"> <input name="q" type="text"/> <button type="submit">Go</button> </form>This is a fully functional search bar. This is all it needs to be. It doesn’t need Javascript, only if you want suggestions.
The last time I checked, Google still works if you simply pass your query in the URL using the
qvariable. Google has no need to enforce Javascript.They need Javascript to serve users an experience that doesn’t look like it’s from the 90s. “You don’t need Javascript” is technically correct in the same way you don’t need Google because you can go look through an encyclopedia in the library.
The kinds of people that disable Javascript probably don’t use Google anyway, and if they do, they’ll have their browsers so full of tracking protection that serving them costs more money than it earns.
Like lack of accessibility? I generally use reader mode, because it gives an actual good user experience rather than “one that doesn’t look like the 90s”. I’m not sure if it turns off JavaScript, but it clearly turns off the crap that it does. Maybe half of websites work that way, the rest I either skip or click to turn off reader mode.
I just tried google, and reader mode is disabled, which is a problem for people with accessibility issues.
Does EU have accessibility protections? Does google give the same ad filled, cluttered, crap as the rest of us? What if you try reader mode
It’s not about looks, it’s about functionality. I could add a hundred lines of CSS to make it sparkle without touching Javascript. I could think of a dozen convenience features that would require Javascript, but none that, if disabled, would prevent the search bar from functioning as a search bar.
You’re not doing AJAX without Javascript, and that’s what the Google search site is optimised for. Plus, there’s no way to deal with the mandatory cookie consent popup without additional page loads either.
You can do most of Google with CSS but you can’t do it easily without sacrificing functionality and Google doesn’t care about the people without Javascript anyway. Why invest time and effort into making this stuff work for customers that don’t earn you anything? It’s not an open source nonprofit that cares about its users, we’re talking about Google.
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why are you using google in 2024 grandpa
Any reccos over duckduckgo? Been quite pleased with it.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Smells a bit Musky
It’s open source and can be self-hosted. I use something similar called Whoogle that I run in a local Docker container. Strips ads, javascript, tracking, and amp links
I think they were just referring to the X in the name.
No offense intended, but why are you still using Google? Startpage has anonyomized results from Google. DuckDuckGo is good enough for most people as well. Brave search also exists if you don’t mind supporting that shitty company.
Can’t tell if because of spyware or because the poor intern they hired to maintain the site for the next month only knows JS frontends lol
Just use SearXNG.
AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.
I think they switched to usually using bing results last year. Their support site mentions they use both backends. I’d guess which one you get depends on which API is cheaper for each country.
It turns out it went multi-engine, probably to prevent getting cut off of Google’s Results. It probably mixes results from multiple engines like the old multi engine search engines in the old days of the internet.
Didn’t they get bought by an ad company?
W search engine fr
Who uses the internet without JavaScript? Must have so many broken websites
True
I started disabling JavaScript by default with uBlock Origin a few months ago. I am surprised to report that a bunch of sites work fine without JavaScript.
There are definitely some sites that actually need it, and for those, it’s just one click to permanently allow for that site. But most of the sites I need work better with just CSS and HTML because there are no stupid nags or social media sign-in buttons that pop-up anymore.
I run NoScript, which blocks all JavaScript. I manually allow websites as I need it. It blocks all kinds of annoying nonsense while I browse.
👑
I installed NoScript just a few days ago, because I’m forced to use a really weak computer that struggles to even browse the modern web. I feel like NoScript improved it a lot, and while quite a few websites broke (including lemmy), I just set the ones that I need working to trusted, but the performance is still good (I should note I’m also using it in conjunction with an automatic tab discarter).
I however also don’t directly use Google. Both SearX and Yandex don’t need javascript, so I’m unaffected by these news, despite being a bit mad about it as a reflection of the direction the web is going as a whole.
Same I started blocking js some sites that need it I will turn it on
Try Ublock origin instead
I’m using both.
