this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Honestly, JS is such a core part of the web, I'm surprised it took this long.
There is no need for any JS to simply POST a query to a web server, and receive an HTML response. This is to force tracking, ad, and AI bullshit on people.
Google is a lot more than just the one google.com page. And even if it were, JS adds some nice features like predective text / suggested searches.
Tracking, ads, and AI can be done without JS. They may be slightly less granular in the same way as the user experience will be slightly worse, but disabling JS won't stop it.
I'd bet the biggest reason Google decided to do this is so that they don't have to support a version of the site that virtually nobody uses.
Imo, the most compelling reason for non-JS versons of typically JS-driven sites is to support lower power devices. But it's 2025 and even a 10 year old phone you found in a dumpster behind a decaying Radio Shack can run modern websites without issue.
Even the article is grasping at straws for why this might be bad. "It might make accessibility more difficult or add security issues". One of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the best engineers in the world, is going to have problems adding aria attributes and updating dependencies? Give me a break.
If you want to block tracking, ads, and "AI", there are plenty of ways to do that without disabling literally all JS. If you want to construct your google search request without the rest of the stuff on google.com, use your browser's search bar.
I'm as anti-google/tracking/etc as the next guy, and I've been using DDG almost exclusively for years, but I'm not going to pretend like asking companies to make HTML/CSS-only versions of their sites is a reasonable request in the modern web environment. It can be really fun and cool to build a site without JS, but there aren't many scenarios where it's actually beneficial.
The replies in this thread are just plain ignorant. Basically every website uses JS heavily and disabling all JS with something like noscript is just a plain bad time.
Even in your comment, every sentence is wrong. Google searches are done with GET requests, and there are plenty of reasons to force JS other than tracking, ads, and ai.
believe me, its over a reasonable request, it's a duty, a respect for technology : javascript towards to enshitification, pure html/css is heaven while JS became now pure evil.