Today we are going to enter the world of web development with a tutorial that can help us diagnose problems of accessibility and usability in web pages. Specifically, we will talk about
how to view a website without Javascript in the browser
.
Many of you will ask yourself what it may be like to
disable Javascript in the browser
, since in principle it could cause a web page to malfunction. This is partly true, but we will see it in detail throughout the tutorial.
Introduction: What is Javascript and why disable it?
Javascript
is a programming language that has gained a special role in recent years. This has been due to the emergence of environments such as
Node.js
, which allow the execution of Javascript from the server side and has also gained much prominence in the frontend development of web pages.
In this article we are going to refer to Javascript when it is executed from the client side, that is, the one that runs in our browsers when we load a web page. In web pages we can find embedded Javascript code or as an external resource, for which the HTML
<script>
tag is used. At this point, I would like to remember a tutorial in which we show how to use
async and defer in WordPress to improve performance
.
Why disable Javascript execution in the browser?
Now that we have a base, we can answer the question of
why disable Javascript loading in the browser
. The reasons may be several, but the most common are:
-
Take a test of accessibility and usability of a web design.
So we can visualize the design of a page in a browser that does not support Javascript or that has it disabled and ensure that it is still usable and accessible.
-
Block advertising or tracking elements that compromise our privacy when browsing.
Javascript is the main method used to embed advertising, visit counters, geolocation systems, etc.
-
Protect yourself from vulnerabilities and malicious techniques that use this language.
The best example is the recent news from websites that take advantage of their visitors for the mining of cryptocurrencies in browsers.
In addition, deactivating the execution of Javascript code will
consume less
system
resources
.
How to view a website without Javascript.
If what you are looking for is to open a web in the browser without running Javascript to avoid advertising, the best option is to use an
advertising blocker such as uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus
(also available for Google Chrome)
.
If you are looking for a
test of accessibility and usability of a website disabling Javascript
, then it is best to continue reading the options that we show below.
Disable Javascript in FireFox.
The FireFox browser has a well-known extension called
NoScript
that blocks Javascript. This extension is free and available from the
Mozilla addons page
. Once the NoScript extension is installed, just activate it to start blocking Javascript.
If we are developers and we want
to temporarily disable Javascript in FireFox
, it is best to use the developer tools with the keyboard shortcut
Ctrl + Shift + C
Then click on the gear icon in the upper right of the developer toolbox and select the option
"Disable Javascript"
in the
"Advanced settings" section
.
To disable Javascript permanently in FireFox we have to access the advanced options by typing in the address bar
about:config
and then we look for the
javascript.enabled
option to change its value to
false
.
How to disable Javascript in Google Chrome.
First of all we have the option of using some extension, but
in the case of Chrome
,
NoScript is not available
, so we will have to use an alternative such as
ScriptBlock
,
Quick Javascript Switcher
,
ScriptSafe
or
uMatrix
.
To disable Javascript permanently in Chrome, we will have to go to
Configuración -> Configuración Avanzada -> Configuración de contenido -> Javascript
and we disable it. We can reach this options panel quickly if we write in the address bar
chrome://settings/content/javascript
.
