Unfortunately, it very much is. Nearly every website on the internet is completely useless without JavaScript.

I visited a large number of links from the HN front page, and many of them had broken navigation or images. You can't actually vote on HN itself either.

The "1% Rule"[0] grew out of this idea -- the hypothesis it poses is that 89% of the users of a given internet forum are strictly lurkers. HN has a more tech-oriented population than many forums, so I bet the differences between groups are less extreme, but I also bet that the overall trend still stands.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Taking away options from users because they don't know well enough can be kind of a self-full-filling prophecy, too. You cater to newbies, you get more and better newbies, entitled ones.

Stuff should be nice to use, of course, and shouldn't have friendly green buttons that makes it shoot knives at you etc. but it also shouldn't be less complex than it needs to be. If you have nothing left to take away you have perfection; if you still keep taking away stuff, you don't have even more perfection, you're just breaking things.

I never heard anyone complain that this option is there, or that it caused any trouble.. so what is this based on? Where are the petitions to remove this option that causes so much grief?

And why stop there? Imagine all the bad stuff you can do with the printer settings. Why are there options that allow people to waste ink, paper, or even maybe damage their printer? How many people threw away their printer, damaging the environment, because they thought it was broken... when all that happened was their cat walking over the keyboard and misconfiguring it? There might be actual kids choking on toxic fumes from those printers right now, nevermind the environment; and we worry about a website not working.

The Firefox options dialog is still kind of messy, and would be even if half of the options were removed. Take some leads from Opera :) Just taking away things doesn't automatically help, logically ordering them while also putting them in tiers of expertise does.

[By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts? They have to go, "hacker news readers" can get them back by editing an .ini setting -- the risk is just too great that someone might open the dev tools and then complain about weird rectangles on their screen, or to fail to convert because the website isn't as pretty as it could be]

Well, when people hear I'm good with computers they usually tell me all sorts of random computer troubles, but this one never popped up.

they probably have data that shows that a significant number of support emails show that disabling javascript was the root core of the problem

Are you sure? They seem to have data that most people don't use the option, and that seems to be all.

Besides, anyone who runs javascript disabled in a modern browser are either developers, or tin-foil hat wearers.

Or people who don't like staring at a white screen for several seconds because some ad scripts absolutely has to be loaded first, when they can have the exact same content, instantly, when browsing without Javascript. DSL still exists, you know. And it helps with noticing weight and skill differences where cable users might see none.

I also didn't get the memo that not providing a non-js fallback for normal day to day web stuff is not kind of noobish. Though I could point you to a host of articles pointing out the opposite, and they are fresher than 2002, too, and not from that usability guy with the ugly website either :P

I think it's nearly impossible to find a webpage without a single reference to a javascript file these days.

You will find a million that work without it, and even more that could work without it if they weren't made by [insert random expletive here].

Wikipedia? Works just fine. Search? Works fine. Facebook? I don't use it anymore, but I remember when it worked fine without JS as well, minus chat and instant notifications (oh god, the horror of only hearing about a new message on a page refresh ^^). Twitter? Breaking Twitter sounds like a good plan, not like a problem. But I digress.

Sadly, my mom doesn't go clicking around in the options dialog, no matter how much I encourage her ^^ Hardly in my presence, not ever in my absence.

But even if it was otherwise; explaining that "this needs to stay on or many websites won't properly function" while pointing out the options she might want to change, would be enough? I mean, you don't even have to understand Javascript to code in it, much less to be aware of the toggle... ?

We have roads with cars on them. People can walk into those roads, but don't. For many reasons, but none of them a deep understanding of biology or physics. If we fenced in all roads, we would avoid some of such accidents that are still happening - but would also raise people who need the fence from then on, because they're used to "wherever I can walk, there is no danger of being run over".

And yes, this also means looking someone who lost their child who ran into the road in the eye, and saying "I'm sorry for that, but it's still worth it to not fence everything in." Are we too squeamish for that? Since when are coders so scared of user complaints based on ignorance or using the software wrong? Don't those come with the terroritory?

Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.

Most of the time, the major content of a page doesn't require it. When it does, it is usually either poor design, or good design where the design is intended to display a bunch of crap I don't want and download a hoard of tracking data.

To put it another way, when I'm surfing, Google Analytics isn't doing anything in my interest.

Increased software complexity and no tangible benefit. Lose-Lose.

If that is true, then point me to all those complaints.

There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox.

That's called kicking away the ladder, and fuck that with a rusty chainsaw. How are people supposed to even get curious about what Javascript is, when they never hear of it?

There are a million ways to display and to drill down into options that would make the FF options less cluttered, more logical, while having even more options than it does. There are ways to inform users pretty much exhaustively via built-in tooltips and documentation -- all of this has been working great in the 90s and got better since then. Icon > Title/Tooltip > Short Description > Verbose Description, so you learn everything you "stumble over" once when you need it, and from then on just use it, with the option to refresh your knowledge anytime.

Just compare about:config in Opera and Firefox, and simply accept we're dealing with different levels of skill and taste here, not just different choices.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-we... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...

Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏

The fact is that most web sites use JavaScript _and_ CSS in a user-hostile manner. CSS is used to draw the eye towards advertising or other content on the site, with the hope of distracting me from what I came to read. Many sites even use CSS to create a faux-popup overlay "window" that has to be dismissed before the content can be viewed.

And of course, the vast majority of JavaScript is aimed at analytics, tracking cookies, advertisements, and other code that, as a user, I'd really rather not execute.

My ideal solution is something like ClickToPlugin, where a site can request JavaScript, and I can choose to grant it or not. Mozilla's decision is disappointing, because they are working in the interest of web publishers instead of web users.

Click to play on plugins is great, Firefox should also have it builtin (as Chrome does).