It depends what you do on the web. To use web applications, obviously you need JavaScript. To read text, you generally don't. Also, even when you do need JavaScript, you generally need it from the original host and maybe one other (e.g., googleapis.com); you don't need it from the analytics and advertising hosts, for example.
Buying things with security add-ons installed sometimes can be tricky: When you click 'buy', the host site sometimes contacts destinations that were previously unknown to your browser (payment processors, etc.), meaning you wouldn't know to enable them. You may hesitate to reconfigure NoScript/uMatrix and reload because you don't know if you are making multiple payments or placing multiple orders.
On the positive side, uMatrix and NoScript can remember what you enabled to get that page working, so you configure them the first time you visit the site and then forget it. NoScript's configurations are less granular, however, which may discourage permanently allowing some things:
I'm using NoScript and I temporarily enable JS on sites.
Usually sites work well enough by enabling 1st party JS and sometimes not even all of them. I lose all the code from tracking and monitoring services, which I really don't care about. I gain a much faster browsing experience.
Then there are sites with CDNs, and I have to enable them to see some content. Or Disqus comments, must enable to read them. Then there are some sites that are like a puzzle and I can't understand what to enable. I either give up (lose-lose) or read them in a browser I use for that kind of sites (I lose, they win). Then there are sites with content embedded in the JavaScript (I really mean in the script, not loaded by the script) or in some invisible element that only JS can make visible. Forbes is one of them and the one I hate most. I did a short script to deobfuscate the content at a Forbes URL and display it in a brower.
By using NoScript I appreciate how useless is JavaScript on some sites: there is no reason not to serve basic content (text and most of the images) directly and use JS only to enhance it. Examples: to add comments, to zoom into images, to load the next article - which has it's own URL anyway.
A pretty good amount. For instance, HN is barely degraded at all. Voting causes a full page refresh, but that's about it.
Some news organizations implement their paywalls with JS. It gets rid of a lot of annoying ads and scroll-behavior modifications. It actually makes some sites subjectively better.
Most of the time you just enable the scripts with domain name and "cdn" in them. Sometimes, it's trial and error to find the fight combo but I usually get it in first guesses. I've found that the sites that were too much ttouble I just skip, momentarily irritated I didnt see the content, and then forget about that site. I can't say Ive lost anything major boycotting the worst offenders.
Yes but when visiting a website with JS turned off, the site can still be progressively enhanced similar to how an electric stairs still works when the power is switched off. Users of the stairs still get to climb it, but now they have to put in extra effort.
> Yes but when visiting a website with JS turned off, the site can still be progressively enhanced similar to how an electric stairs still works when the power is switched off.
It can, but sites often don't test that path (if they develop it at all), because it only applies to people who intentionally disable JavaScript.
Once upon a time, screen readers and similar accessibility software didn't work well with JavaScript, so better sites would pay attention to that case for accessibility. However, screen readers work fine with standard browsers and JavaScript now, which makes the "JavaScript disabled" case an incredibly tiny fraction of web users. (In fact, Mozilla found a few years ago that there were far more users with JavaScript accidentally disabled than people who actually wanted it disabled.) So, handling disabled JavaScript by just saying "you seem to have disabled JavaScript; you should fix that" really does seem appropriate for the proportional amount of time worth spending on that tiny subset of users.
That said, know your target audience. If you're building a mainstream consumer product, the proportional amount of time worth spending on running with JavaScript disabled rounds to zero. If you're building a product catering to a smaller subset of users, and you expect people with JavaScript disabled to represent a much larger fraction of your potential users, by all means take the extra development time to make that case work well.
Enabling first-party scripts makes most of it usable, but not all. Disabling first-part scripts means probably about 50% is still useful. The internet seems so much 'quieter' with NoScript installed...
