Do You Disable Javascript?

[mdinire]

Thanks to this thread I do.. NoScript is very cool

 

[Goity]

fgs just stay away from dodgy looking sites.

 

[Javacat]

a Java applet seems to be the way to go.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo


90% of the time that firefox crashes for me it is down to a java applet of some sort. I've completely disabled Java on most of my PC's in Firefox.

 

[Alex.]

Java applets take a long time to initialize, and slow down the whole browser in the process. Java has no place on the internet. I can understand its advantages for other purposes, but not here. As for Javascript, I only allow it for select web sites like GMail and such where enabling it gives me a direct benefit. Everything else is blocked by default (NoScript), as it should be.

 

[rememberthe8bit]

I used to, mostly as a spyware paranioa thing. But, now that I've switched to Mac/Linux entirely, I don't care. (NoScript FTW, though.)

 

[Blah]

Well if you have Java disabled you just wouldn't get sound. Everything else would still work. If you can tell me another way to do pluginless sound, I'm all ears. But the applet would be very tiny, probably less than 100k. At least for me, small applets don't really bog things down. And they don't take too long to initialize (less time then Flash). PS: I hope this post comes out okay, I'm using the Links Browser right now.

 

[Squidge]

That's no problem, Web pages shouldn't be trying to blurb stuff out of your speakers anyway

 

[trooper]

That's no problem, Web pages shouldn't be trying to blurb stuff out of your speakers anyway

That is unless it`s an ebay auction. :rolleyes:

Trooper

 

[Blah]

On the data layer its just SVG+SMIL, someday soon major browsers will support it directly, but for now Javascript + Java will be used to emulate SMIL, and SVG will be converted to VML (if the user-agent is IE), using XSLT. Downlevel browsers get served HTML + CSS (the 'lite' version).

So hopefully the Java + Javascript + XSLT + Server Side user-agent sniffing mess will become redundant soon. But at least we can possibly get a taste of the WWW that the W3C dreamed of. That is if I get this done.

 

[Logomachist]

Java on the web was very problematic in the early days, but implementations have gotten better and if you're out to make web accessible program with full desktop functionality, I'd say Java is a good choice. If you just want eye candy, Flash would probably be better IMHO.

But when it comes to playing multimedia on a web page, I prefer pages that let ME control the media that's playing, not some Flash or Java applet.

I only disable Javascript when I go to suspect sites. I know security concious people recommend disabling Javascript as default, but I think they're paranoid.

Javascript is supposed to be sandboxed so it can't hurt your computer, cross-site scripting is blocked, and as it's been around for years I would think most of the vulnerabilities have been fixed. Unless you're doing something shady like falling for phishing schemes or look for warez, is does enabled Javascript cause more problems than it fixes? I don't think so.

And we need something w/ Javascripts functionality, because there's a gap between what you can accomplish with declarative languages like SVG and SMIL, and what you need a full fledged programing language for (like Java).