Google now requires JavaScript

m_f@midwest.social to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 797 points –

Just started getting this now. Hopefully it's some A/B testing that they'll stop doing, but I'm not holding my breath

158

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.

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.

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..

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/mildlyinfuriating

which 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.

I don't think I used Google in the last 5-6 years. It's duck duck go all the way.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Yep. I use Noscript and DDG Lite by default. Just putting into duckduckgo: !g will search google without having to turn JS on...looks like Duckduckgo wins again, even when it comes to using google, lol.

Who still uses Google? DDG has been way better for a long while now. Join the duck side.

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.

Uses Bing results.

Configurable, though, to use many other engines and results.

Lots of overlap, but there are a couple other indexes out there.

Kagi is also good. Better imo really

It really isn't

Giving up your payment information is not great for privacy

Love how you’re getting downvoted for suggesting a great search engine which doesn’t require JavaScript. Stay classy, everyone.

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.

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.

  
    
    Go

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 q variable. 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.

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 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

I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.

https://search.inetol.net/

It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:

https://searx.space/

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'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 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:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://htmx.org/

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

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.

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).

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.

AFAIK Startpage gives you google results with your privacy intact and less ads.

I think they switched to usually using bing results last year. Their support site mentions they use both backends. I'd guess which one you get depends on which API is cheaper for each country.

W search engine fr

they def wanna maximize data collection with javascript

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.

Where are you? The JavaScript block also seems to disable reader mode, so maybe they serve a different page in places with accessibility requirements

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.

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

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.

I installed NoScript just a few days ago, because I'm forced to use a really weak computer that struggles to even browse the modern web. I feel like NoScript improved it a lot, and while quite a few websites broke (including lemmy) (but most will still display the content), I just set the ones that I need working to trusted, but the performance is still good (I should note I'm also using it in conjunction with an automatic tab discarter).

I however also don't directly use Google. Both SearX and Yandex don't need javascript, so I'm unaffected by these news, despite being a bit mad about it as a reflection of the direction the web is going as a whole.

Same I started blocking js some sites that need it I will turn it on

Switch to Kagi

I get a notification every month telling me that they will charge me for my monthly Kagi subscription and every single month i feel the same:

'Totally worth it!'

I feel like their pricing would make more sense if you could just pay for your usage, rather than forcing a subscription

They do have different tiers depending on your search volume and features, so in a way they already have this. I'd hate to have to go through checkout every time i did a search.

Why do you think you have to go through a checkout?

They could just pool your owed money and then charge you that at the end of the month, or let you maintain a pool that you throw money into that they take from as you use it.

They have 100, 300, and unlimited for $0, $5, and $10

How much would you be willing to pay per search? And do you know how many searches you make every month?

For me, i pay not for the searches as such, but to not be tracked and be shown more ads than search results

I haven't been using kagi long enough to really understand how it works yet, but it's my understanding that they want you to pay every month, even if you had remaining searches from the previous month.

If I pay $5 for 300 searches, why does it matter if I do them within a time frame? When someone isn't' searching, they aren't really costing Kagi anything.

Alternatively, let people pay 1.6 cents per search (or 1.8 cents or something).

Basically because the product they're selling isn't "You get to do a search whenever" but "You get to do a search this month".

The reason for that, based on my experience with various web startups, is they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.

If millions of people pay their $5 and then don't use their searches, then in the extreme case Kagi could be maintaining servers twenty years later in anticipation that their customers might use those searches.

It's an edge case, but it illustrates the point.

Also, on the customer side, there's a psychological benefit to free things. Free as in "already paid for; no cost to using it".

If you have something that can be used this month but not any other month, then using it is free. If using it now means you can't use it next year, then there's still a cost to it despite it already being paid for.

they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.

I think you are definitely correct here. However, you are overlooking the actual main goal of every business - making as much money as possible.

That kind of stability does make money.

Contrary to what MBAs want to believe, there’s no way to actually model a business in its entirety. Instead we have to use heuristics. And that predictability — minimizing the amount of potential energy in outstanding transactions (like searches paid for but not yet used) — is of value.

One can put a number on the value, but such numbers are always a little arbitrary.

Stepping back though, even if we want to make an attempt at a purely numerically model, the present value of selling a search can go way negative if one has to keep the server running indefinitely until a person uses the search.

If I sell you a search, and then you wait ten years to actually use the search, my side of the contract ends up including ten years’ worth of server costs as my server sits there waiting for you to use the search.

Again, it’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point. The cost of delivering on my sold goods goes up the longer you take to actually collect those goods. The physical world analogy would be if I sold you a car but then you took ten years to take possession of the car: now I’m paying for a garage to store that car for ten years.

Generally speaking, that’s the monetary reason to put a cap on the time involved in delivering on a sale.

Another angle to look at it is that money tends to devalue over time, and so goods (relative to money) tend to inflate in value over time. If I sell you a baseball for $10 and then you take a hundred years to collect on my baseball promise, maybe by then a baseball costs $100 and I’ve “lost $90”.

In summary, there are numerical models that show the costs of unbounded delivery times, but even without that there is a value to the predictability boon of keeping transactions time bound.

I don't think the 100 is ongoing, I don't think it resets

As a former web dev, good. I didn't get paid enough to care about the people that block JavaScript