As you can imagine, I ran into some problems. Netflix wouldn’t work. Neither would YouTube, at least not without turning on Adobe Flash, which would kind of defeat the point of turning off JavaScript. And of course you can forget using Google Docs without JavaScript.
But the most surprising thing is that most things just worked. And in many cases, worked better. Pages loaded nearly instantly, my laptop battery lasted longer, and I could browse the web with fewer distractions.
A JS-free world is out of the question, but it does spark an interesting conversation about our tools-first approach to developing sites and dovetails nicely with our recent post on building offline sites with ServiceWorker.
Martin Wolf’s take was pretty funny:
His experience without Javascript was so glorious that he turned it back on after one week.
