Should your website work without JavaScript [duplicate]

Answer 1

This is an issue that I was thinking about just a few days ago. Here is some information

• In Google Chrome there is no way (menu/option) inside the browser to turn off Javascript.
• Many websites including those from leading names like Google, etc., will not work without Javascript.
• According to stats over 95% of visitors have Javascript enabled now.

These stats made me think. Do I have to break my back writing a lot of background code and everything for users who have disabled Javascript?

My conclusion was this. Yes, I have to include Javascript support, but not at the cost of sanity. I.e. I can afford to give it a low priority.

So I am going to have support for non-javascript browsing, but I will build most of it after my site is deployed.

Answer 2

Coming back more than 10 years later, it's worth noting my first two bullet points have faded to insignificance, and the situation has improved marginally for the third (accessible browsers do better) and fourth (Google runs more js) as well.

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There are a lot more users on the public internet who may have trouble with javascript than you might think:

• Mobile browsers (smartphones) often have very poor or buggy javascript implementations. These will often show up in statistics on the side of those that do support javascript, even though they in effect don't. This is getting better, but there are still lots of people stuck with old or slow android phones with very old versions of Chrome or bad webkit clones.
• Things like NoScript are becoming more popular, so you should at least have a nice initial page for those users.
• If your customer is in any way part of the U.S. Goverment, you are legally required to support screen readers, which typically don't do javascript, or don't do it well.
• Search engines will, at best, only run a limited set of your javascript. You want to work well enough without javascript to allow them to still index your site.

Of course, you need to know your audience. You might be doing work for a corporate intranet where you know that everyone has javascript (though even here I'd argue there's a growing trend where these sites are made available to teleworkers with unknown/unrestricted browsers). Or you might be building an app for the blind community where no one has it. In the case of the public internet, you can typically figure about 95% of your users will support it in some fashion (source cited by someone else in one of the links below). That number sounds pretty high, but it can be misleading; turn it around, and if you don't support javascript you're turning away 1 visitor in 20.

See these:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/121108/how-many-people-disable-javascript
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/822872/do-web-sites-really-need-to-cater-for-browsers-that-dont-have-javascript-enabled>

Answer 3

I think that depends on the type of web application you are going to build. For example in an e-commerce application the checkout process should propably work without java script because there are some people who deactivate js for checking out (in our experience). In a web 2.0 application in my opinion it isn't necessary to support non-js browser experience. Developing for both also complicates the development process and is more cost intensive. you have double your web test efforts (testing with and without js) and also think different in the planning phase.

Answer 4

To add to some of the old discussion on this page. Google is now searching JavaScript: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/81-web-general/4248-google-now-searches-javascript.html

Answer 5

You should weigh the options and ask yourself:

1) what percentage of users will have javascript turned off. (according to this site, only 5% of the world has it turned off or not available.) 2) will those users be willing to turn it on 3) of those that aren't willing to turn it on, or switch to another browser or device that has javascript enabled, is the lost revenue more than the effort to build a separate non-javascript version?

Instinctively, I say most times the answer is no, don't waste the time building two sites.

Answer 6

I asked myself the same question the other day and came up with the answer that in order to use my application one must have Javascript enabled. I also checked various Ajax powered sites. Even Stackoverflow.

But considering this fact I also believe that you do need to support some degree of prehistoric applications. The main idea is to not let application break when users don't have enabled Javascript. Application should still display relevant data, but its functionality would be limited.