Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
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Btw it’s possible to fingerprint people with JavaScript disabled. I found this article explaining and demonstrating if you’re curious.
Yeah, it’s not impossible, but it’s much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox’s privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here’s also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It’s been a year or so since I’ve gone down this rabbit hole, but what I remember, the more you block ads and tracker, the more unique your browser becomes, and the more fingerprintable it is.
Tor’s approach is to make every instance if the tor browser look as identical as possible to websites. But Tor is pretty niche. If Apple did the same with Safari, you would be an identical device in a match larger pool of devices.
I think Apple has taken some measures, but not as well as Tot has.
I’ve been happy with Qwant lately, they have their own index so using them doesn’t support the Google + Bing hegemony. They’re also EU based and regulated by the gdpr.
Use LibreX or a fork called LibreY, it’s a JS-free proxy for Google search
There’s a list of instances at https://librey.org/instances.php
Something similar exists for DuckDuckGo btw, it’s called 4get
Or you can just use SearXNG, a meta search engine that aggregates results from multiple sources
The comments I come to Lemmy for!
Here’s a list of public SearXNG instances.
Sweet, just tried using the LibRedirect Firefox plugin to redirect search to these instances and it worked!
If you ever need a search engine without JavaScript or https, give http://frogfind.com/ a try. Works great on ancient browsers and operating systems.
Thanks… But no HTTPS?
Yes, it targets old operating systems. Old browsers don’t have the right certificates installed, nor do they support current encryption algorithms and protocols.
No offense intended, but why are you still using Google? Startpage has anonyomized results from Google. DuckDuckGo is good enough for most people as well. Brave search also exists if you don’t mind supporting that shitty company.
These are also just fun:
I also use Mojeek when I want a (serious) different set of results that I’m not getting from those pulling from google, bing, etc. It’s not the best but it’s getting better over time.
thanks a lot for mentioning us; you can send us in searches which could be better via the submit feedback button on results pages, if you’d like :D
Use any of the following:
rip lynx browser, unless- alternative search engine?
Yep. I use Noscript and DDG Lite by default. Just putting into duckduckgo: !g <your search goes here> will search google without having to turn JS on…looks like Duckduckgo wins again, even when it comes to using google, lol.
So like !g <squirrels holding nuts> and I’ll get googled?
Yes, the brackets were just there to emphasize it was a search query. Apologies if that was confusing.
No need to apologize, mate. Your comment was super helpful.
I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
Because they dont need to
Probably because 99.999% of users already use JS and dedicating a web page to it is already more work than they needed to put into it
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
I think it’s just to avoid explaining why, and how they harvest your data. That said, I also hate how a lot of errors of the big corpo are just like “This site has an error” no error-code, no further feedback what to do etc.
BOW TO YOUR MASTERS, AND SUCK OUR DICK!!!
I remember 10 years ago looking at a calculator app in the android app store, and seeing the permissions. And thinking “WHY THE FUCK DOES A CALCULATOR NEED MY LOCATION, AND ACCESS TO MY PHONE CONTACTS???”
Fuck THAT.
What dick? pretty sure it’s fallen off from all the STD’s.
All those years, and I still have no explanation why some apps want my browsing history.
I found out yesterday the Samsung system camera app will not function without “Nearby Devices” permissions. Utterly ridiculous.
It needs to be able to tell nearby devices to “say cheese”, so they can blink their LEDs prettily before you take a photo.
A lot of websites are react which doesn’t function without JavaScript. It’s a more powerful tool for web dev and can be a better experience for the user if used right.
Great. If that was their reason, they could explain that. But they didn’t and that’s my beef.
But since you seem to be tech savvy, you also already know why they don’t explain which great features of react they want to use on this page. And we all already know it’s not for the user’s benefit. It’s for money they receive from data mining every minute of our lives.
In google’s case, you might be right. However in general what are you expecting the website to say? An explanation of why react was chosen over other languages? Otherwise the reason you have to enable JavaScript on a react website is because the site doesn’t work without it. I see that like complaining that your gas light on your car doesn’t provide an explanation as to why gas is required for it to run.
If you are curious why a lot of sites use languages like react instead of plain html, there are a few reasons. Prior to react like languages, web servers would generate the page, send it to you, and then anytime you interacted with the site it would send you a whole new page to display. I.e. if you opened a popup for uploading a file, it would send you a whole new page to display which is why older sites flicker on basically any interaction. Newer sites that use things like React are downloaded once. It basically downloads the code to make the website and then runs entirely on your machine. The benefit to this is that if you sort a list, open a drop-down, open a popup to download a file, etc. it all happens on your computer instead of some remote server. No need to wait for a server to respond or download a new page, it can update that specific part of the page instead. Some sites are even fully functional offline because of this which is really cool in my opinion.
This makes a far better user experience because everything is instant and doesn’t trigger page reloads on every interaction with the site.
It’s good for developers because it allows code reusability and vastly increases what you can do. Many of the critical features I have on my site are not possible without JavaScript/React. I actually first developed the site using the old style and changed it over to React because of those limitations.
Google could have updated their site to one of these languages to open up new possibilities in what they can do on their site. That or they might be making it more consistent with their other products for maintainability reasons. I find it unlikely that the people who have JavaScript turned off are a large enough portion of the population for them to care about their data but I could be wrong.
Switch to Kagi
I get a notification every month telling me that they will charge me for my monthly Kagi subscription and every single month i feel the same:
‘Totally worth it!’
I feel like their pricing would make more sense if you could just pay for your usage, rather than forcing a subscription
They do have different tiers depending on your search volume and features, so in a way they already have this. I’d hate to have to go through checkout every time i did a search.
Why do you think you have to go through a checkout?
They could just pool your owed money and then charge you that at the end of the month, or let you maintain a pool that you throw money into that they take from as you use it.
They have 100, 300, and unlimited for $0, $5, and $10
How much would you be willing to pay per search? And do you know how many searches you make every month?
For me, i pay not for the searches as such, but to not be tracked and be shown more ads than search results
I haven’t been using kagi long enough to really understand how it works yet, but it’s my understanding that they want you to pay every month, even if you had remaining searches from the previous month.
If I pay $5 for 300 searches, why does it matter if I do them within a time frame? When someone isn’t’ searching, they aren’t really costing Kagi anything.
Alternatively, let people pay 1.6 cents per search (or 1.8 cents or something).
Basically because the product they’re selling isn’t “You get to do a search whenever” but “You get to do a search this month”.
The reason for that, based on my experience with various web startups, is they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.
If millions of people pay their $5 and then don’t use their searches, then in the extreme case Kagi could be maintaining servers twenty years later in anticipation that their customers might use those searches.
It’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point.
Also, on the customer side, there’s a psychological benefit to free things. Free as in “already paid for; no cost to using it”.
If you have something that can be used this month but not any other month, then using it is free. If using it now means you can’t use it next year, then there’s still a cost to it despite it already being paid for.
Doesn’t it require JavaScript?
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A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here’s a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:
The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.
Htmx does use javascript under the hood, but just makes it so the developer can use html markdown for more a more interactive environment that’s driven sever side. So the initial page load should render, but UI elements might not work as intended.
htmx is more a move back to REST as it was originally defined (aka not json backend).
They’re also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won’t even need htmx/JS/etc, it’ll just be what your browser does by default
Jesus Christ no.
As a web developer, nooooooo.
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JS is like a disease where it does not need to be. I would honestly welcome an Internet alternative that was all web 1.0 (with up-to-date security updates and methods). There’s good uses for it in interactive websites that provide cloud services, but most of it is fud and breaks the whole notion of HTTP GET URLs you can just share and cache.
A large majority of modern web applications are built with Javascript… Both frontend and backend. You do still have a large majority of websites using plain HTML or PHP, with some features requiring JS to function (modals, realtime stats, data input, etc).
You also have alternative languages like Java or C# (and more), but also may use bits of JS on the frontend to drive functionality.
You can bet that the majority of websites you visit nowadays will use some form of JS, unless it’s a static webpage to display basic information.
You’re still using Google search?
Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I’ll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can’t shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.
Use the bangs in DDG, eg !g asks DDG to search google
I use ddg. But that just uses Microsoft’s bing on the backend right?
Unless you use the bangs. !g tells it to use google
lol. nope. not happening. that’s not how to get me to even think about using your search again (having quit over a decade ago).
What, you don’t want to interact with a CIA asset?
