Comment on Google now requires JavaScript
csm10495@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.
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 framework. 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
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 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
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.
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. 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 react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19
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:
www.definitions-seo.com/images/altavista-3.jpg
Or another:
www.webdesignmuseum.org/…/yahoo-2003.png
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.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 1 month ago
Google is a text input and a list of links. It should work without JS.
filcuk@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
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.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 1 month ago
This is an optional feature. The core search functionality does not require JS.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 1 month ago
*Was an optional feature…
filcuk@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
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.