This is where I stand. I’ve made some very javascript heavy web apps in the past, and frankly I do nothing to cater for people who don’t enable javascript in their browser on those sites.
If I’m working on some e-commerce site though, it makes sense to make the site as accessible to everyone. I think context is important.
Why not just swap to using Opera - you can then simply attach a JavaScript on/off checkbox in the status bar of the browser.
There’s a simple little ad-on for Chrome that does the same thing. Very handy. 
And FX
Sometimes people turn off javascript for security purposes. At the least your application should warn the user that if javascripts are NOT turned on, they will NOT be able to access the full features of a particular website.
Opera has it built in though so that you don’t need to add anything.
I just added the js off plugin to FX. Now I have 3 ways to turn off js. I only turn js off to test though. I am very happy with the way I have recently found to gracefully degrade my sites when js is off.
<script type=“text/javascript”>
document.documentElement.className = ‘js’;
</script>
That little line is independent of libraries. Put it in the head. Adds the class of js to the html. This is the only solution there is to 100% completely remove FOUC. Other than doc.write that is. There are jquery ways. But if you place your scripts at the bottom your FOUC gets pretty bad.
Our e-commerce sites can’t do diddley-squat without Javascript. You can’t add things to your cart. You can’t even see your cart. You can’t read product reviews, or see the product’s rating number (a jQueer widget that displays images of stars-- no text because everyone know blind people don’t buy stuff on teh interwebs). You can’t read the submenu (dropdown menu… which, by the way, is a table separate from the menu that is tacked on with Javascript when you onmouseover the menu items. Yes). You can’t click half the links. The forms don’t work either, because they don’t have submit buttons, just Ajaxian onclicks and onchanges. Want to choose a different colour Thingie? Sorry, choosing a colour is a complicated task not up to the likes of decade-old checkboxes or selects. No no no, Javascript is absolutely the only way to let people choose an item. After all, e-commerce is an application and applications simply can’t be expected to do anything without Javascript, so people had better turn it on if they want to actually… buy something from us.
Yeah, almost every link is one of these:
<a href="" class="bunch of classes">
<input type="button" onclick="goto_url('long generated url');" value="name of link">
</a>
Without a hash or even a space character in the href, in some browsers you can’t even focus on the anchor, because the browser doesn’t consider it an anchor. Though in the above case, the input is still an input, so you can focus on that. It just doesn’t do anything when you hit enter. Not that it matters: most of the javascript that isn’t listening for clicks, only does stuff onmouseover, usually calling a jQueero called “hoverIntent” (meaning after you hover over something, you have to wait a while before something happens for you. You know, because web users are very known for being patient waiters).
So see, this is where turning off Javascript shows you your garbage code. I don’t think it occurred to anyone else that simple HTMLy things were being overly Javascripted.
I once asked why are we so retarded? One answer I got was, “it’s for SEO”. Meaning I guess they don’t want google clicking on these links because more than one link to a single product “waters down the google juice” or something.
Later I got another answer: it was just an anchor wrapped around a button to look like a button, but IE wouldn’t click on those, so the onclick was added to make it work in IE. Instead of, you know, just letting them remain anchors and styling them to look like buttons.
FML
Why not just swap to using Opera - you can then simply attach a JavaScript on/off checkbox in the status bar of the browser.[/QUOTE]
I created a pluging as I wanted to learn how to do it and it seemed like a simple enough functionality to start-with.
I’d like to use Opera again - although it is currently busted on my Linux so I have to find time to reinstall it.
Normally I won’t create a custom plugin without thoroughly looking if something already exists.
Glad to hear that there are plugins for most of the different browsers and Opera has it natively.
Opera has pretty much everything natively 
^ … but for how long?
muhahahahaha
Damn, I’m going to have to redraw my Opera with, like, webkit colours or something 
I know this is an old thread but for anyone Googling we’ve started a project to try & answer this question:
http://howmanyusershavejavascriptdisabled.com/
Hi toni_b. welcome to the forums.
That’s an interesting project. I think sites like stat counter have stats like that, don’t they?
I was reading that the latest version of Firefox prevents users from disabling JS, which is a bad move IMHO.
How do you count people who have JavaScript turned on for some sites and off for others? The best browsers allow you to selectively disable or enable JavaScript on a site by site basis.
I always have JavaScript disabled for all Google sites because their sites work better without JavaScript than they do with the garbage scripts that they use. I do have JavaScript enabled for most other sites but selectively turn it off for any site that is slow loading or where the scripts malfunction.
I’m in that group. Similar to how I don’t enable bandwidth devouring SWF/images/CSS unless I want them enabled, I “toggle” javascript on a site by site basis.
If Firefox won’t let me, I’ll be using a different browser soon.
This bug report explains. They hide the checkbox from preferences, forcing one to either use a plugin or crawl through :config each time.
Worse really is how they goaded everyone into accepting automatic updates, claiming that “we’ll keep your current settings as they were”… except, of course, if when they believe you’re so stupid that you accidentally had it disabled all this time and oh, you couldn’t possibly have meant that because you were not only dumb, but you somehow never noticed how most sites didn’t even work at all. So they “fixed” that for you-- by changing your chosen settings. Oh but it’s just this one time, we can still trust them. Like when they remove that “confusing” Properties option from the context menu for images. The hoardes of confused were breaking down the doors just begging Mozilla to relieve them of that impossible-to-understand Image properties option, which had bene in there from the beginning, and was echoed by all other browsers.
I remember when Chrome didn’t allow me to disable Javascript (you could start if from the terminal with the --disable-javascript option, but then couldn’t switch it on). This was pretty much what kept me from using Chrome for anything other than webkit testing.
Thanks for that Stomme poes, I saw mention that it will be back https://twitter.com/davidbruant/status/351415593141940224 which is a relief, I’d rather not toggle via about:config, nor use yet another addon.
With Opera you don’t need to toggle it on and off - you just set it the way you want for each site and it will turn itself on and off.
I hate how Opera does it: I have to, for each site, maintain some long list of domains which may or may not run Javascript.
I mean, for any particular site I visit, Javascript may be running from ~ 5-10 domains, some of which are just subdomains of the site in question (so I usually want to run their scripts) to ad sites (who I usually don’t), share-crap-plugins (don’t), tracking (don’t), and things like comments (maybe).
I do agree with Mozilla that NoScript is an excellent plugin and usually very good for managing Javascript (esp per domain without explicitly maintaining white/blacklists). That way it keeps track of “lists” for me: If I go to some news site, and I want their JS on because otherwise their menu is garbage, but don’t want disqus domains running because they slow everything down, but do want sidebar junk loaded dynamically from subdomain.site.com, but don’t want anything from blahblahblah.facebook.com… all just by clicking, and override-able by clicking as well.
No, this is just as silly, now it’s in the dev tools. Meh. Next thing you know they won’t want us turning off images, cause hey sites look really bad with images blocked… fffffff.
In addition to turning off JavaScript for specific sites I also put the JavaScript checkbox in the status bar to make it easy to turn JavaScript on and off as required.
I have a small number of problem sites where JavaScript is permanently off (eg. Google) and turn it on and off as needed for other web pages.
Of course just as some sites are broken with JavaScript turned on there are also sites that never finish loading if you have images turned on and where you have to turn images off to be able to access the rest of the page.