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How well does it fail?

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Now when we look at new things added to HMTL, new features, new browser APIs, what we tend to ask, of course, is: how well does it work?.
(...) That’s an excellent question to ask (...). But I don’t think it’s the most important question. I think it’s just as important to ask: how well does it fail? Jeremy Keith, on Evaluating Technology

I just found out that my adBlocker also has an option for disabling all JS on a site:
adBlocker screenshot

And that made me think about what master Keith said in one of his talks. So I went ahead and checked out some popular sites to see how well these would fail.

Some of the results might seem obvious, some not so much. I think it is a great exercise, to see these sites without JS enabled, because you get to see how great teams dealt with failing well. In some cases, a small design choice makes the page hold up, in others, a completely different site is served. I encourage you to try it out!

Let's see some examples:

YouTube
YouTube without JS


Twitter
Twitter without JS


Dev
Dev.to without JS


Google
Google without JS


So let's play a game! Dive into the web, and look for interesting sites and see how they approach a JS-less world. I'd love it if you would post your findings as well!

Disclaimer: this is just for fun. No need to indulge in why js matters discussions, it's not the point here.

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