I have JS off 99% of the time and I don't feel that I give up a lot! Rather the opposite:

Whenever I see something interesting here on HN or somewhere else and the site wants me to turn on JS, I realize that the subject may not be that interesting at all and just close the tab. Big time-saver! Win-win. :)

Exactly my approach. I only enable it for work (sometimes I actually need to do webdev) and web sites that I really need to use, like travel agencies.

I recommend NoScript(Firefox plugin) for blanket or selective JS removal from web pages.

Browsing with NoScript is fine if you just visit the same websites over and over. If you actually like to _surf_ the web, the experience is reduced to a never ending configuration nightmare. At least that's my experience. Nice in theory, but a terrible UX.

Seriously, I'm been using it for more than 5 years and I've only enabled it for local sites and everything is working.

It depends on what sites you browse. I don't do any social, use google or any other crap, so it's enabled to 0 internet sites with no problem.

If I need to activate it I have a shortkey (vimperator) that opens a new firefox profile (private and prepared to load crap) for the current site so I don't load any terrible UX in my default profile.

NoScript, ublock and SDC are a must for the current state of Internet. It's like drop the garbage out the window than in the garbage bin, you need to put care into it. :)

If I'd use something that required configuration, I think I'd use https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix. I did use it for quite awhile, but ended up ditching it. Now I'm on uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Self-Destructing Cookies. Although I might lose some control, it just works.

I do that. One discovers that some sites include a dozen of third party js. Often enabling the first party one is enough. Sometimes I have to enable some obvious js for displaying videos or comments. Many sites work well enough and display their content without all the related links, advertising, trackers etc. Some sites insist using js to display content that is already inside the main html file. Others break because their main script cannot handle the failure to load some other file. That used to happen when blocking Google analytics. The popularity of adblockers fixed that.

All considered it's an interesting developer experience and the sites I work on keep working even if some scripts don't load.

I don't see that as a problem, really.

Well behaving sites end up on your whitelist. Everything else gets tossed into the "yet another bloated crap page" bucket.

Can't your browser turn off JS on a per-domain basis? Just wondering.

Firefox doesn't seem to afford this beyond installing an extension. Somewhat annoyed that Firefox, with the reputation that it has for privacy and choice, doesn't offer a simple toggle in their settings panel.

Chrome can do the opposite, white list per-domain.

uMatrix does this well (if you are on Firefox)