The user wants the site to actually work. The features don't matter if the site won't load because it's trying to shove multiple megabytes of JavaScript through a congested DSL or dial-up or 2G Internet connection (and especially not if that mass of JS is in turn trying to pull multiple megabytes of graphics before deciding to finally even add the actual content to the DOM). A prospective customer who can't use your website is a customer who's jumping ship to a competitor (as the article described with rather realistic examples).

And for the vast majority of websites, the users don't actually want (let alone need) that degree of interactivity. A blog shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A storefront shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A restaurant page (even one with a reservation system!) shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Even something like Twitter shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Unless you're building something like Trello that's heavily dependent on drag-and-drop as a basic workflow, there is no good reason to make JavaScript a hard dependency on using your site.

If users are forced to allow arbitrary Turing-complete code to run on their machines because your site is inexplicably incapable of running without it, then you have utterly failed. That's harsh, but that's reality. Your users want oodles of JavaScript only in the sense that a penguin wants to swim through an oil slick.

> No - users actually do want more features. They want more features than you can ever hope to deliver. Figuring out which features they will actually appreciate is the tough part. Your competitors are working very hard to build those features before you can. Your competitor's sales team is already cold calling your users.

I'll believe it when I see it. With notable exception of collaborative editing, most software on the web is essentially a subpar reimplementation of desktop software from 10 years ago, missing half of the features, but consuming 10x the resources.