Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
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I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
Because they dont need to
Because if they typed out an honest reason why, you would avoid them like the plague.
Google is no longer a Search Engine. It is a commerce/purchase search. It’s nothing more than ads and corporate results to purchase goods & services. Google Shopping has taken over Google.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t ;)
By the way, in my browser, the title of this post shows up as
Google now requires Javascript in c/mildlyinfuriatingwhich shocked me a little.
Sundar Pichai is the admin for this community, didn’t you know?
i use startpage ;)
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.
Google is a text input and a list of links. It should work without JS.
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.This is an optional feature. The core search functionality does not require JS.
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.
Thank you for deciding what was better for us, we would have been so wrong without you. /s
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 frameworks. 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
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’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.
Any chance you know what version that went out with? I did a brief look at 18 and 17 and couldnt find it. Id really love to know how they are managing this.
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 because it kinda defeats the purpose. 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 https://react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19
So you’re offloading the JS processing onto the server? I cant be understanding this correctly because there is no way anyone wants to pay for the serverside cost of something that used to be an end user “cost”. Also this would add interaction latency.
There is no latency on static pages. They are rendered once as regular HTML and then saved on the server to be immediately ready for the user. The server is only processing that initial data fetching and rendering once per site. If needed, it can be retriggered. This is great for blogs and other regular pages.
Server pages on the other hand will do the initial fetch request every time but once the site is there, no data is missing and everything is there. It’s not for everyone. Regular dynamic pages still make sense. For every method there are use cases.
Disclaimer: I’m speaking from my experience with Next.js which did the same thing long before and React now aims to make that easier. But I’m not sure if React has the distinction between static and server. It’s all new and I haven’t had a project to test it on yet.
Oh I see, its only for a static page. This makes so much more sense.
I can see why you mentioned this feature fits weird with react, and I have to agree, its contradictory to the entire purpose of React lol.
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
For full functionality sure. For basic functionality no. Searching on Google is basic functionality I’d say.
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.
I love that society is basically stratifying into groups based on tech knowledge - it all seems very Cyberpunk.
The more technology pervades society the more pronounced this will get. The sheer helplessness of people when faced with problems that seem trivial to some is scary. Especially when you see people losing final theses or critical work related data because they never learned about backups.
Add to that tech companies trying to hide the concept of a file system, and it seems like this is by design to sell more shit.
Yeah, obscuring and abstracting away the atomic units of the system is a classic.
On the other hand self-education has never been easier, and there are open source alternatives of pretty much everything.
You’re still using Google search?
Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I’ll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can’t shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.
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Use any of the following:
I might be out of my depth here, but isn’t like virtually the entire internet powered by Javascript? What are the negative implications for Google requiring JS?
A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here’s a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:
The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.
Booo! I knew I made the right decision switching to DDG.
JS is like a disease where it does not need to be. I would honestly welcome an Internet alternative that was all web 1.0 (with up-to-date security updates and methods). There’s good uses for it in interactive websites that provide cloud services, but most of it is fud and breaks the whole notion of HTTP GET URLs you can just share and cache.
There are so many alternatives
Use LibreX or a fork called LibreY, it’s a JS-free proxy for Google search
There’s a list of instances at https://librey.org/instances.php
Something similar exists for DuckDuckGo btw, it’s called 4get
Or you can just use SearXNG, a meta search engine that aggregates results from multiple sources
The comments I come to Lemmy for!
Here’s a list of public SearXNG instances.
Sweet, just tried using the LibRedirect Firefox plugin to redirect search to these instances and it worked!
lol. nope. not happening. that’s not how to get me to even think about using your search again (having quit over a decade ago).
What, you don’t want to interact with a CIA asset?
These are also just fun:
I also use Mojeek when I want a (serious) different set of results that I’m not getting from those pulling from google, bing, etc. It’s not the best but it’s getting better over time.
thanks a lot for mentioning us; you can send us in searches which could be better via the submit feedback button on results pages, if you’d like :D
I’ve been happy with Qwant lately, they have their own index so using them doesn’t support the Google + Bing hegemony. They’re also EU based and regulated by the gdpr.
