Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
Who uses the internet without JavaScript? Must have so many broken websites
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 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
Who still uses Google? DDG has been way better for a long while now. Join the duck side.
searxng? Anyone?
Brave search 🤙
Uses Bing results.
So that’s why it’s so good at finding porn.
Just use SearXNG.
AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.
Didn’t they get bought by an ad company?
W search engine fr
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.
they def wanna maximize data collection with javascript
I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
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
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
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.
All those years, and I still have no explanation why some apps want my browsing history.
What dick? pretty sure it’s fallen off from all the STD’s.
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
Because they dont need to
I’m just kind of surprised Google still worked without JS up until now. The people who don’t have Javascript enabled are such a tiny sliver of market share that Google may as well serve them a broken web page.
I think Duckduckgo still supports searching without Javascript, though you may need to wait for a meta refresh when you use the standard search engine integration, so make sure you use the right URL in your search engine settings.
<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.They need Javascript to serve users an experience that doesn’t look like it’s from the 90s. “You don’t need Javascript” is technically correct in the same way you don’t need Google because you can go look through an encyclopedia in the library.
The kinds of people that disable Javascript probably don’t use Google anyway, and if they do, they’ll have their browsers so full of tracking protection that serving them costs more money than it earns.
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.
You’re not doing AJAX without Javascript, and that’s what the Google search site is optimised for. Plus, there’s no way to deal with the mandatory cookie consent popup without additional page loads either.
You can do most of Google with CSS but you can’t do it easily without sacrificing functionality and Google doesn’t care about the people without Javascript anyway. Why invest time and effort into making this stuff work for customers that don’t earn you anything? It’s not an open source nonprofit that cares about its users, we’re talking about Google.
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.
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 ;)
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?
lol. nope. not happening. that’s not how to get me to even think about using your search again (having quit over a decade ago).
I just disabled Javascript and Google still works fine. It might be only Google’s mobile site that requires it.
Could very well be a mobile thing. I was pretty annoyed recently when logging into gcal for work on my phone, it refused to let me sign in without giving them my cell phone number. When I switched to wifi, it stopped bugging me, so clearly they pay attention to that sort of signal.
Can’t tell if because of spyware or because the poor intern they hired to maintain the site for the next month only knows JS frontends lol
