Why do people disable JavaScript?

Published at: Feb 23, 2022

These are the reasons some people choose to partially or completely disable JavaScript from running in their web browser.

• JavaScript can make websites more annoying

  As you can see in our examples of JavaScript, you can make websites do all sorts of things - this gives developers the potential to make websites more useful, streamlined, and user friendly... but it also lets them do annoying things too, such as pop up Newsletter subscription prompts, make things flashy & distracting, prevent you from leaving a page, keep popping up alerts, or change the default functionality of your browser - such as disabling the Right Click on your mouse, prevent you selecting text, or changing the way the page scrolls up and down.

  Since those annoying "features" are powered by JavaScript, disabling JavaScript will also prevent the website from making those annoying features operate.

• JavaScript can make it easier for companies to track you

  Cookies are a common way for you to be tracked online; but it's JavaScript that's responsible for a lot of the work in actually doing the tracking. The JavaScript in advertisements, social media embeds, and dedicated tracking tools all stop working if you disable JavaScript. There are still ways for you to be tracked online, but if those methods are done with JavaScript, having it disabled will stop them from working.

  Now, there are easier ways to disable these creepy online trackers than completely disabling JavaScript - for example, there are browser extensions which help you prevent tracking libraries - but the fact is that disabling JavaScript will certainly help a lot with this too (although you could argue that it's a bit of overkill to completely turn it off in your browser just to stop tracking).

• JavaScript can have security concerns?

  There's quite a bit of detail required to fully cover JavaScript security concerns, because security is a complex topic, and so is JavaScript itself. So I've put this topic in it's own section here:

  Read more:Is JavaScript secure?

  Find out about security problems with JavaScript

  But the summary is: Security concerns with JavaScript are a bit exaggerated, and it's actually probably not the main reason you would consider disabling JavaScript.

• JavaScript can slow your computer or phone down

  For JavaScript code on a website to "do what it does", your web browser "runs" that code - this means your computer follows the instructions written by the website developer, and if those instructions are very complex, or if they're not written efficiently then it can over-utilize your computer's CPU and Memory and make your computer run slower.

  Computers and phones are much faster than they were ten or twenty years ago, so this hasn't beentoo much of a problem recently, but sometimes you'll find yourself on a website and it justslows....your....computer....down.... unti you close the tab.

  I've noticed that it's often a lot of big News websites that are guilty of this - they can have literally dozens of different tracking scripts embedded and when they're all combined, it really does just slow your computer down. Disabling JavaScript in those scenarios certainly does speed up your browsing experience.

  But if you're finding that your computer is running slow on lots of websites, it might be time to consider upgrading it to something a bit faster and with more memory.