Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
You must log in or register to comment.
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 might be out of my depth here, but isn’t like virtually the entire internet powered by Javascript? What are the negative implications for Google requiring JS?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Booo! I knew I made the right decision switching to DDG.
why are you using google in 2024 grandpa
Any reccos over duckduckgo? Been quite pleased with it.
I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
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.
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
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.
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
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
Doesn’t it require JavaScript?
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.
AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.
Didn’t they get bought by an ad company?
I think they switched to usually using bing results last year. Their support site mentions they use both backends. I’d guess which one you get depends on which API is cheaper for each country.
It turns out it went multi-engine, probably to prevent getting cut off of Google’s Results. It probably mixes results from multiple engines like the old multi engine search engines in the old days of the internet.
W search engine fr
Oof ouch my Lynx.
Oh well, there’s always DDG and friends.
they def wanna maximize data collection with javascript
There are so many alternatives
Who uses the internet without JavaScript? Must have so many broken websites
I installed NoScript just a few days ago, because I’m forced to use a really weak computer that struggles to even browse the modern web. I feel like NoScript improved it a lot, and while quite a few websites broke (including lemmy), I just set the ones that I need working to trusted, but the performance is still good (I should note I’m also using it in conjunction with an automatic tab discarter).
I however also don’t directly use Google. Both SearX and Yandex don’t need javascript, so I’m unaffected by these news, despite being a bit mad about it as a reflection of the direction the web is going as a whole.
Try Ublock origin instead
I’m using both.
I started disabling JavaScript by default with uBlock Origin a few months ago. I am surprised to report that a bunch of sites work fine without JavaScript.
There are definitely some sites that actually need it, and for those, it’s just one click to permanently allow for that site. But most of the sites I need work better with just CSS and HTML because there are no stupid nags or social media sign-in buttons that pop-up anymore.
True
I run NoScript, which blocks all JavaScript. I manually allow websites as I need it. It blocks all kinds of annoying nonsense while I browse.
👑
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Smells a bit Musky
It’s open source and can be self-hosted. I use something similar called Whoogle that I run in a local Docker container. Strips ads, javascript, tracking, and amp links
I think they were just referring to the X in the name.
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
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!
The comments I come to Lemmy for!
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.
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.
Use any of the following:
