> Diaspora, Friendica, YouTube, Google Maps, Quitter (GNU Social), and
Reddit?
Yes, apart from Google Maps, the use of JavaScript seem trivial and generic.
They mostly use JavaScript just to load text using XMLHttpRequest() and put
it on a page (comments, posts, etc.).
An Google Maps is definitely SaaSS! Why do I need to be constantly online
and be telling Google everything, where I am and want go, so it can give me a
map or calculate a route? This is something that my computer should be able
to do too, offline, with a non-web program and a file of maps of cities I
care for.
> I agree it's a lot of work, but so is convincing every Web developer to
start conforming to LibreJS's license tags. And besides, this way it would be
possible to actually replace proprietary scripts ourselves.
I just don't understand the usefulness of this - are people going to audit
all the JavaScript on the web? Even keeping in mind that sites constantly
update their scripts?
> JavaScript is a programming language, so of course it's possible to do
something malicious with it. You can only limit the capabilities of a
language so much before you start hindering its usefulness.
Well, I didn't mean "malicious" in this sense, as your example about the ads.
You can easily ruin your site for your visitors without JavaScript too, as
your example shows. :)
By "malicious", I mean doing things outside of your own website suck, like
taking private information of a your visitors' computers, making them send
information to other sites on your behalf, or infecting computers.
> Fingerprinting is the most prominent example. Much of the Tor Browser
Bundle's countermeasures against fingerprinting involve blocking certain
JavaScript functionalities.
To be honest, I'm not very familiar with this issue. Maybe it has something
with the other cookie-like capabilities JavaScript provides? If there such
issues, browsers should fix those.
