Happily used to (5 years ago) surf the web with no JS and no CSS, or rather applying my own style-sheet for 90% of my web viewing. I'd fall back to Chrome when absolutely necessary. It was fast and comfortable, it just relies on well structured accessible content.

There's also a nice Open Source project which implements that using a proxy:

https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/miniwebproxy

> it just relies on well structured accessible content.

Honest question: how much of this is left? What popular sites are still accessible this way? HN might be the only site I visit frequently where browsing with no js/css has any hope of working.

Try it and see. I block a ton by default[1]; most sites are just fine without it.

I get that some people have low tolerances for things not being perfect. CNN stories without JS usually have a pile of empty images at the top, for instance. But that is probably fixable; I just haven't bothered to figure out which bit of JS to allow for that.

Usability depends on your tolerance for imperfections vs. your tolerance for being observed.

[1] Current setup uses JS Blocker 5, uBlock, an aggressive cookie manager and my home proxy, which does a ton of things, many of which I don't even remember at this point.

Check surfraw (by Assange), you can actually access a surprising amount of resources using sr and lynx from a terminal. Text only, but still makes internet pretty useful.

Are you aware of any piece, writeup review or anything on Assange’s programming skills?

No js is suprisingly fine. Google search works, gmail works, maps don't :)

I browse HN using w3m, from which I'm commenting right now. It works on probably 80% of the links I attempt to visit. In many cases it works better than a graphical browser: I only see article text, and for reasons I haven't investigated I often seem to be ignored by paywalls. I never see subscription nagboxes or ads. Sometimes I have to search forward for the title to skip the load of garbage that precedes the article text.

While we, as devs, may get tired of the constant beat-down between site flexibility and privacy, many of our users are unaware. They will go blindly towards flexibility and we have a duty to find as much compromise as possible between those two values lest we just say "it's an easy fix, just turn off your computer". There has to be a middle ground between extremely paranoid turn everything off and extremely liberal with my anonymity (and on the internet, it's not governments who are going to help find it).

I guess my point is "how much anonymity is it reasonable to expect?" Should I have a problem with the fact that nigh-on every URL in the world will leave behind a little footprint when I request it? I don't see an enormous problem with a website anonymously recording the fact that I've clicked a link.

("anonymously" assuming I'm blocking their cookies, which I would if I were that paranoid)

> ("anonymously" assuming I'm blocking their cookies, which I would if I were that paranoid)

Note that cookies are mostly a convenience vis-a-vis tracking. For user tracking, there's nothing really stopping the server from vending you a version of their site with custom CSS that loads images with a fingerprint in the URL, which would still work with cookies disabled. That'll get you coherent signal on a session (gluing different sessions together would be a bit more challenging, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible).

I don’t mind sites tracking to know what products sell and what doesn’t, what browsers people use or how Long I spend on the site etc.

What I hate, is the fact that I go to agoda, I search for hotels in jiufen in taiwan, I look at only 2, I book one of the 2, I close it. Open up Facebook on my phone seconds later and have adverts saying: hey how about these 2 hotels in jiufen.

That shit annoys me. Stop following me and tracking what I’m doing and sharing it with all these companies. It makes me want to not use the internet...

a footprint is not a fingerprint. This whole thread is about non-anonymous tracking.

Completely disabling CSS will make a lot of sites inaccessible. Partly disabling it (for example the #after part) would be interesting...

Wonder how complicated a CSS Parser / White-listing extension would be?

Complicated enough to be a security nightmare

That's pretty much the "reader mode" available in some browsers, no?