Breaking Bad: Quantifying the Addiction of Web Elements to JavaScript

TL;DR

This study investigates the dependency of web pages on JavaScript by disabling scripts and analyzing breakages, revealing that many pages are partially functional without JavaScript, which can significantly reduce tracking.

Contribution

The paper introduces a framework to measure web page breakages caused by disabling JavaScript and provides empirical data on web dependency and tracking reduction.

Findings

43% of web pages are not strictly dependent on JavaScript

Over 67% of pages remain usable with minimal content, reducing tracking by 85%

Many websites can be functional without JavaScript, promoting privacy and security

Abstract

While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to systematically block scripts reported by crowdsourced trackers lists. However, this solution heavily depends on the quality of these built-in lists, which may be deprecated or incomplete, thus exposing the visitor to unknown trackers. In this paper, we explore a different strategy, by investigating the benefits of disabling JavaScript in the browser. More specifically, by adopting such a strict policy, we aim to quantify the JavaScript addiction of web elements composing a web page, through the observation of web breakages. As there is no standard mechanism for detecting such breakages, we introduce a framework to inspect several page features when blocking JavaScript, that we deploy to analyze 6,384 pages, including landing and internal web pages. We discover that 43% of web pages are not strictly dependent on JavaScript and that more than 67% of pages are likely to be usable as long as the visitor only requires the content from the main section of the page, for which the user most likely reached the page, while reducing the number of tracking requests by 85% on average. Finally, we discuss the viability of currently browsing the web without JavaScript and detail multiple incentives for websites to be kept usable without JavaScript.