30 June 2017

Daring Fireball: “Using Today’s Web without JavaScript”

Again I say: the web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting. Every site on the web would load in under a second.

John Gruber

A faster web, but immensely less powerful. Without a coding language in web browsers, most of the innovations that shape our world today (from Google’s fast search engine to Facebook’s huge social network, from Gmail to YouTube to Twitter to Amazon) would have never been invented or would have taken an entirely different path. Before mobile apps, all these online services developed in the browser.

Gruber also conveniently forgets how the web saved Apple at a time when Microsoft’s desktop dominance was almost absolute: by introducing a new development platform, independent of the operating system, the web allowed Macs to survive in the PC world, and eventually to recover. Without a JavaScript-enabled web, Apple may not even have survived to this date – and Gruber would be out of a job.

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