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 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.
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.
All those years, and I still have no explanation why some apps want my browsing history.
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
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.
It probably logs the error automatically. There’s nothing you can do on your end to fix their code problem in most cases which is why there is no feedback on what you should do…
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
Because they dont need to
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.
Because if they typed out an honest reason why, you would avoid them like the plague.
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.
Back in the day it was the best at what it did, but there’s less demand these days for that kind of old fashioned search.
Its still better than the competition at finding the URL of a corporate or government entity. Its still helpful for searching other websites for particular content - for example, the wikis for some games have an obtuse layout and unhelpful search function, and google can be the best way to find a particular page in that wiki.
Before ChatGPT existed, and before the enshitifaction of Reddit reached the critical level its at today, google searching site:reddit.com was pretty good at finding organic human conversations that provide actual answers to your questions.
Today however, ChatGPT is better at providing useful answers to whatever questions you may have. And Bing is better at image search.
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.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t ;)
By the way, in my browser, the title of this post shows up as
Google now requires Javascript in c/mildlyinfuriatingwhich shocked me a little.
Sundar Pichai is the admin for this community, didn’t you know?
i use startpage ;)
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.
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.
*Was an optional feature…
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
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
I love how Lemmy users just assume everyone is a coder… Just a funny observation, not being rude. Lol
Presumably… If you’re complaining about the use of Javascript, you have some coding knowledge. Otherwise it’s like complaining about the steering wheel in a car, when you can’t drive and don’t have a licence.
Either they have the knowledge to confirm your answer, or you’re just being a backseat driver
It wasn’t required, but id wager 99% of website that exist currently run JS in some form or another for something.
Id wager its impossible to have anything dynamic on a webpage without JS (minus visual dynamics which can be handled with css), at that point you have to replace it with a different programming language and every browser needs to completely change gears to allow other code to run instead. But what advantage is gained by changing to another programming language? Cleaner code w/ less jankyness? Sure I guess, but we would be moving mountains to accomplish a silly thing.
I’m wondering if many people in this thread understand what JS is and does.
I’m a React dev. You can create server side websites, written in JS, that don’t require JS to be turned on in the browser. Granted, this just became a new official feature in React but has already been available with React frameworks like NextJS
That is insane! I’m wondering how they handle modifying the DOM w/ out JS, did HTML 5 get a significant update? I gotta look into this because that sound super interesting.
Any chance you know what version that went out with? I did a brief look at 18 and 17 and couldnt find it. Id really love to know how they are managing this.
It’s called Server Components. If you actually build a fully static website, there is no DOM modification going on. I would actually not recommend doing that with React because it kinda defeats the purpose. The goal of it is to have a mix of both. The initial render is super fast because it is prerendered once for everyone. Then dynamic data is being fetched if needed and elements are replaced. It also improves SEO.
React 19 is not yet officially released but you can read more about it here https://react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19
So you’re offloading the JS processing onto the server? I cant be understanding this correctly because there is no way anyone wants to pay for the serverside cost of something that used to be an end user “cost”. Also this would add interaction latency.
There is no latency on static pages. They are rendered once as regular HTML and then saved on the server to be immediately ready for the user. The server is only processing that initial data fetching and rendering once per site. If needed, it can be retriggered. This is great for blogs and other regular pages.
Server pages on the other hand will do the initial fetch request every time but once the site is there, no data is missing and everything is there. It’s not for everyone. Regular dynamic pages still make sense. For every method there are use cases.
Disclaimer: I’m speaking from my experience with Next.js which did the same thing long before and React now aims to make that easier. But I’m not sure if React has the distinction between static and server. It’s all new and I haven’t had a project to test it on yet.
Oh I see, its only for a static page. This makes so much more sense.
I can see why you mentioned this feature fits weird with react, and I have to agree, its contradictory to the entire purpose of React lol.
I wish JS would die and we get nice and simple websites back. I hate web dev so god damn much. The internet is pure enshittification
I don’t know how to tell you this, but removing JS doesn’t turn the internet into a wonderland. Capitalism is to blame for enshitification not JS
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.
Idk if you were around when Google popped up, but it was at a time where the internet was feeling increasingly “loaded” with thousands of info per page. One where the popular engines tried to serve you twenty different things along with your search. Here’s an example:
https://www.definitions-seo.com/images/altavista-3.jpg
Or another:
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/yahoo/yahoo-2003.png
This isn’t a search engine. This is an all you can eat buffet, where the smallest plate is two main courses and three sides. And users just wanted a candy bar.
So you see, a lot of us started to use Google because it was simple. It was decluttered. It was a text input with a ‘submit’ button, and that’s all we wanted. THAT is, and was, google’s core functionality, and I think it’d do them well to remember that.
Now, if you wanna argue that’s changed, I can agree to that. But I don’t want morning news when I search for porn, that’s just gonna kill my boner. And I don’t want ads about coffee makers when I’ve just bought a coffee maker, that just means you’re incompetent. I want a search engine that searches things and provides results. That’s it. And just like Google caught momentum because they delivered this minimalistic facade that the users wanted, this is also how Google will die - at the hands of the next lightweight engine without corporate bullshit. Because the users will gobble it up.
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 agree that it’s not a big deal, but there still should be an option in my opinion. It can be a lifesaver to be able to search on older devices.
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.
The worst part was that it just showed a black window, with no controls or indication of what was wrong. Thankfully this sort of thing happens so often my first reaction is to turn off my pihole for a few minutes.
If you’re getting locked out of those things, those things are not worth using
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.
I mean, of course, but that’s a little out of the realm of your control. Minecraft isnt lol
Sometimes people need to play minecraft with their nephews or nieces. Trust me, it’s necessary and very much worth it.
I play Minecraft with my kids, but I don’t use a Microsoft account for it. Just PollyMC and host my own server.
You cant just make it work?
Unfortunately not. Some things just don’t work on Firefox no matter how hard you try.
What did she use? Chrome?
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.
The more technology pervades society the more pronounced this will get. The sheer helplessness of people when faced with problems that seem trivial to some is scary. Especially when you see people losing final theses or critical work related data because they never learned about backups.
Add to that tech companies trying to hide the concept of a file system, and it seems like this is by design to sell more shit.
Yeah, obscuring and abstracting away the atomic units of the system is a classic.
On the other hand self-education has never been easier, and there are open source alternatives of pretty much everything.
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
I don’t think I used Google in the last 5-6 years. It’s duck duck go all the way.
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.
Who still uses Google? DDG has been way better for a long while now. Join the duck side.
searxng? Anyone?
Hell yeah
The vast majority of humanity still uses Google. DDG is basically unheard of outside of tech enthusiast circles.
…and who also has JS off? That seems like a weird combination.
I agree, but if you want js off while web browsing, you’re already in that advanced tech circle and are a part of that demographic.
Its gaining ground very quickly
Uses Bing results.
So that’s why it’s so good at finding porn.
Configurable, though, to use many other engines and results.
Lots of overlap, but there are a couple other indexes out there.
Yeah, I should have said “by default” because that is how most people will use it, but the power users will use other engines.
Kagi is also good. Better imo really
It really isn’t
Giving up your payment information is not great for privacy
Got about half way through this, yikes. I thought their pricing was already a bit steep per search, but considering the company decisions, it does not fill you with confidence.
Love how you’re getting downvoted for suggesting a great search engine which doesn’t require JavaScript. Stay classy, everyone.
Probably because they didn’t mention that it’s not free.
Nobody asked. We were talking about g about good search engines, of which Kagi is one.
Brave search 🤙
Edit: I forgot that Lemmy hates Brave and doesn’t want anyone to use it. Be warned, there are some concerns people have about the organisation.
It isn’t half bad
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<form method="GET" action="https://duckduckgo.com/"> <input name="q" type="text"/> <button type="submit">Go</button> </form>This is a fully functional search bar. This is all it needs to be. It doesn’t need Javascript, only if you want suggestions.
The last time I checked, Google still works if you simply pass your query in the URL using the
qvariable. Google has no need to enforce Javascript.deleted by creator
It’s not about looks, it’s about functionality. I could add a hundred lines of CSS to make it sparkle without touching Javascript. I could think of a dozen convenience features that would require Javascript, but none that, if disabled, would prevent the search bar from functioning as a search bar.
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Like lack of accessibility? I generally use reader mode, because it gives an actual good user experience rather than “one that doesn’t look like the 90s”. I’m not sure if it turns off JavaScript, but it clearly turns off the crap that it does. Maybe half of websites work that way, the rest I either skip or click to turn off reader mode.
I just tried google, and reader mode is disabled, which is a problem for people with accessibility issues.
Does EU have accessibility protections? Does google give the same ad filled, cluttered, crap as the rest of us? What if you try reader mode
They don’t need javascript to serve their website, and their website hasn’t really been updated all that much. So there wasn’t really any reason to stop supporting it.
This change is very likely meant to be against privacy respecting users.
Use any of the following:
Just use SearXNG.
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
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!
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.
