Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio

Re:Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video a... by jazoom on Monday February 04, 2019 @08:33PM (#19082398)

I'm the creator of Price Hipster, which you linked to. It's not just that pretty much no one disables JavaScript. It's also that the website is very interactive and responsive and would have to be designed very differently to avoid JavaScript. Much more data would be consumed if every action resulted in a call to the server and a fully rendered page returned each time, and the website would be a lot less snappy and less nice to use.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video a... by Nadya on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:04PM (#19087184)

That sounds like a great line to put in your <noscript> tag! For the three or four people who hit your site with JS disabled each decade. ;)

"Price Hipster is a modern website and requires JavaScript to be enabled."

This tells me nothing about what the site does, why the site needs Javascript enabled, or gives me any incentive to whitelist Javascript for the site since I don't know why or what it will be doing with Javascript.

Now, I happen to know what your site does because of your (previous) post here on HN. So I understand that what you are doing more or less requires Javascript and that's fine. On the plus side, at least you have a message instead of literally-a-blank-page! :)

Didn't mean to pick on you, as I mentioned in the post it was basically the first five hits on HN for "this website is blank with Javascript disabled" since I don't keep a personal list.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video a... by 3xblah on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:29PM (#19082829)

I apologise that he used your site as an example. Nice work, BTW.

The question we were discussing is whether a user who "just wants to read an article" needs to keep Javascript enabled for every website she visits, or whether she could keep it off by default and whitelist a smaller number of sites where she wishes to turn on Javascript for whatever reason (such as Price Hipster).

I would not question whether anyone should enable Javascript when using the web to do shopping online.

However I think "just reading an article" online is a different category of use entirely. The costs of enabling Javascript in that case may outweigh the benefits.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video a... by jazoom on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:54PM (#19082912)

> I apologise that he used your site as an example. Nice work, BTW.

No probs. I know people here get passionate about the health of the WWW. And thanks :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video a... by godshatter on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:32PM (#19087423)

Your site did it right, though. It gives a message about how javascript is necessary and then, when enabled for that domain, didn't force me to enable tens of domains to make it actually work. I'm getting very weary of the "determine which minimum set of domains js must be enabled for in order to browse your site" game. So thank you for that.

[ Parent | on HN ]