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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I love that society is basically stratifying into groups based on tech knowledge - it all seems very Cyberpunk.
As someone with technical knowledge sometimes I get locked out of things because I block ads or refuse Javascript. For instance, I had to turn off my pihole so I could sign into my Microsoft account to play Minecraft. Or the times I encounter a website that breaks on Firefox.
The Microsoft Minecraft login thing is getting pretty insane.
If you’re getting locked out of those things, those things are not worth using
This is my stance.
Like, the cost of doing business is jumping through stupid ass hoops. If you don’t want to do that, don’t join? Or be okay with doing funky ass work arounds.
I’m pretty sure my divorce lawyer’s document management system is something that’s worth using even if I have to use chrome and disable ad blocking.
You cant just make it work?
Unfortunately not. Some things just don’t work on Firefox no matter how hard you try.
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:
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.
I know this may come off as a surprise: but I imagine that requiring JS in 2024 isn’t a big deal to most people.
Now of course Lemmy skews more into that small crowd.
I don’t blame any website for requiring JS for full functionality in 2024.
All of the people replying to this saying you shouldn’t need JS are totally unaware how modern web development works.
Yes, you could do many sites without JS, but the entire workforce for web development is trained with JS frameworks. To do otherwise would slow development time down significantly, not allow for certain functionality to exist (functionality you would 100% be unhappy was missing).
Its not a question of possibility, its a question of feasibility.
My question is if it wasn’t required before and is required now, what changed? It’s not like Google has added a killer feature recently - this is almost certainly related to those shitty AI answers that are forcing your actual search results even further down the page than they were already.
Even things like lazy loading and such require js though
A lot of features might not be obvious honestly
If you’re interested though, you could check the source which should be able to tell you immediately what they use it for
Google is a text input and a list of links. It should work without JS.
It’s far more than that. Even on a basic search page. Ever expanded the ‘Peaplo also ask’ section, for example? It loads more results based on your scroll position or interaction.
There’s loads of little things like this, you may just not notice or care about it - which is another discussion.This is an optional feature. The core search functionality does not require JS.
That’s not up to you, or any of us.
Not maintaining non-js version makes sense for the business, considering how few people are affected.All we can do is move away to something better.
Thank you for deciding what was better for us, we would have been so wrong without you. /s
*Was an optional feature…
For full functionality sure. For basic functionality no. Searching on Google is basic functionality I’d say.
Not really. Showing ads and gobbling up data is Google Search’s core functionality, and JS is indispensible for that.
You should still be able to use something like Lynx to browse and search. There’s no reason to block basic functionality except that you can and don’t care.
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 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.
Booo! I knew I made the right decision switching to DDG.
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.
why are you using google in 2024 grandpa
Any reccos over duckduckgo? Been quite pleased with it.
I use ddg, despite the horrible name it’s very useful for me. I’ve been thinking about kagi the paid search engine but haven’t committed yet.
As a former web dev, good. I didn’t get paid enough to care about the people that block JavaScript
There are so many alternatives
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!
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.
Use any of the following:
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.
Oof ouch my Lynx.
Oh well, there’s always DDG and friends.
Google is no longer a Search Engine. It is a commerce/purchase search. It’s nothing more than ads and corporate results to purchase goods & services. Google Shopping has taken over Google.
I guess ublock origin is doing wonders then, for me it’s still the same…
I don’t use Google, but with UBO it still very much is a viable search engine. People just aren’t very effective at SEO and search ineffective terms. That being said, fuck google.
Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.
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.
