Browser statistics on JavaScript disabled [closed]

Question

I am having a hard time collecting publically available statistics on the percentage of web users that browse with JavaScript disabled.

Yahoo has published data from 2010 and R. Reid published data from 2009 (picked from a site he had access to).

The findings from Yahoo were rather interesting at that time:

We took a combination of access logs and beacon data (previously included in the page) and filtered out all of the automated requests, leaving us with a set of requests we could confirm were sent by actual users. This data, which is completely anonymous, gave us a good indication of traffic patterns in several countries.

After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic, with the highest rate being roughly 2 percent in the United States and the lowest being roughly 0.25 percent in Brazil. All of the other countries tested showed numbers very close to 1.3 percent.

This is about what I could find so far. But since this data is getting old, I wonder what the percentages are today.

I also looked at Statcounter, which seems to be the only company left to still openly publish browser statistics. But they do not publish data about JavaScript. I know that W3schools also publish stats, but since the target is aimed at developers, this data is extremely biased and therefore not interesting for me. (it has to be representative for ordinary users).

I, therefore, ask you to provide:

• links to any open, freely available statistics which touches this area
• Your own stats, preferably from larger sites with do not target developers

Phosphorescent

Related: discussion on ux.stackexchange.com on whether it is ok to require javascript from users. – Yasmeen

came across this: searchenginepeople.com/blog/stats-no-javascript.html not sure when the stats were taken but the comments are fairly new. – Mantilla

@PatrickLorio, your link has the SAME source as i refer. The link is from december 2010, and has exact same numbers, and even refers Yahoo. Unfortunately there are also no new data in the comments – Bowing

@JesperRønn-Jensen sorry about that. I've been looking around, can't find anything recent. My guess is that the % has gone down. – Mantilla

FWIW, if you're looking for data sources, opendata.stackexchange.com would be the right site to ask now. – Mcdermott

The OP asked a perfectly legitimate question that is important to countless developers, presented some data that were getting old and asked for more recent data. Why was it closed as off-topic? This is precisely the information I was looking for, and it is how I found this post. – Salado

Answer 1

Give the basic info, with a clear route for how to go further - update your browser!

I think sacrificing functionality for 99% of users to accommodate 1% is sheer bloody mindedness.

Sure, it is possible to allow for non-javascript enabled content for every aspect of a website, plus provide the optimal experience - but the budget is going to sky-rocket for the build.

There's some seriously awesome stuff going down with Javascript which actually makes sites far more accessible! - where do we draw the line here?

"Sorry, your computer is too old and slow to render this website." OR

"Sorry, 99.9% of the planet, we've presented you with a sub-optimal 1993 experience because 0.1% of you have outdated tech"

I don't buy the '1%' is important argument - if someone Really wants to access a website, they'll find a way - plus those instances where companies are forced to use, say, ie7 with javascript turned off - heck, they probably aren't allowed to browse anything but the corporate intranet anyway!

Time to get off this dumb old idea you need to have a non-javascript option for everything on your website, it really is an outdated concept.

Legere

How is this constructive? Whilst true, it doesn't answer the question in any way whatsoever. The OP is asking what percentage of users have JavaScript disabled, not reasons why it is dumb to support said users. – Springhalt

This does not answer the question. -1 – Skeens

I actually enjoyed this answer as I was considering supporting non-javascript enabled users but also decided to not support < IE8 explicitly (or any IE for that matter lol) so although the answer was not completely constructive it helped me with my decision. We can't keep supporting the 1% or it will just get worse. It is super simple to update to a modern browser these days. – Cadal

If you earn mony with your website, and you have a lot of visitors, 1% may be a lot of money. CEOs have been fired for less than 1%. – Pressurecook

I think this clearly is an answer to the question. @what Maybe the get fired, but 1% is really not a lot of money, additionally, ads are almost always displayed with javascript, so they wouldn't even see the ads. – Biennial

We are, the 99%! Ha ha :-) I agree with your answer completely. It's not worth sacrificing the experience of the vast majority of users to support a (very) small fraction of users on super old browsers. Just have a <noscript> message on the site prompting them to update their IE 2 browser! – Faultfinding

I have my javascript disabled on my old old old phone (S3) ...because with the power discharge very quickly, I lower my phone cpu frequency which then affect when browsing web page(these days pages with massive slides and all those ads...), so then I started to disable javascript...ofc I whitelist some webpages like SO....lol – Clintclintock

Opinions. Some are not even well informed. – Minaret

i found this on w3schools "The average user tends to use the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives" -- i think the average user uses chrome :P – Thurmond

Rather than weighing the two sides of the coin, I think its crucial to figure out who your target audience is. If you are designing a hip new website targeted towards trendy, technologically savvy people, of course you can happily ignore those outdated bunch. On the other hand, if you are catering to government officials or people in China, then compatibility should be your top agenda. – Pejorative

You are correct but do you know a mobile browser called UC web (Popular in android device now a day) is actually fetch your site without script and render them for fastest load on slowest connection concept. How to overcome that? Any idea? – Opinion

Stackoverflow is obsessively focused, and I almost always appreciate that. There are cases where someone is driving off a cliff, and is asking a question about how to tune the radio to a particular station. In those cases, it is extraordinarily helpful to point out the steering wheel or the brakes. This question isn't quite to that extreme, but I appreciate this answer very much. Thanks you! : ) – Wertheimer

This really doesn't answer any of the questions. -1 – Sorci

No, this doesn't answer any questions, but it does bring discussion to the table, which will hopefully answer other questions or promote other ideas. Given 100+ people liked the comment, I'd consider it useful. – Legere

Facebook has a non-javascript version of their website. They 100% care about their users. – Haws

@Matthew Trow, By your arguments, no one should worry about making any site handicapped accessible since they are only a small percentage of the population. I have no compassion for those who choose not to update, but great compassion for those who are unable to do so. – Ethical

Answer 2

Discussions

Most active and extensive discussions on StackExchange sites on this topic:

• P.SE's Why do People disable JavaScript?
• W.SE's Should I Worry About People Disabling JavaScript?
• W.SE's Can We Ignore Visitors Without JavaScript Enabled?
• P.SE's Should I Bother To Developer For JavaScript Disabled?
• UX.SE's Is It OK to Require Certains Users to Have JavaScript Enabled? (credit goes to Ward Muylaert for digging this one up)

Additional Links

• Why Support JavaScript Disabled? (PunkChip, 2011)

Stats

You're right... These are pretty hard to come to. Could actually only find the ones you mentioned, the YDN 2010 article being referenced quite often.

I guess you could also use a traffic tracking and analysis suite to verify these stats on your own, if you have a site with sufficient traffic and the relevant demographic you are aiming for.

Personal Thoughts

In my personal opinion, it's fair enough to require some very specific areas of a site to require JavaScript, but you should try as much as possible to provide an alternative if that's the case. For the rest of the site, I consider that, especially for government and educational websites, you have a duty towards minorities like disabled people and visually-impaired people to make the web readable and usable for them as for any other user.

Warfourd

From the Punkchip link, "The 2010 WebAIM Screen Reader Survey found that only 1.6% of screenreader users have no Javascript when browsing, so that argument is wearing thin. ... Don’t continue the myth that supporting non-Javascript users is an accessibility issue." – Arbil

@josh3736: true, but for a university's or government's website, it's intolerable that these 1.6% of screenreaders cannot access their courses, their social security services (especially for them!) or their local council's emergency numbers just because some crazy web-dude decided Web 2.0 was a must. – Warfourd

@Warfourd I disagree. That 1.6% only exist because they are using outdated technology, such as an unimpaired person using IE6. They can easily access that information just by updating their technology for free. If it was true there was no way for them to access it, than I would agree, but I don't think that's the case. Just my opinion, but JavaScript is now a basic language of the web and I think it's time we stopped making excuses to add work for ourselves for an incredibly small minority of people who CHOOSE to limit their experience usually for outdated reasons. – Nonreturnable

I don't think you get the point. He is talking about IMPAIRED people. Unimpaired people that aren't using javascript are usually doing so nowadays for privacy reasons (a lot harder to track you on the web), but some people who are visually impaired are using javascript-reliant technologies to help them get around the web without vision. These people don't care about old technologies, they care about being able to "view" the web at all. And while smaller company sites should really feel no need to accommodate them, sites like universities and government, where info is key, definitely should. – Michail

@Nonreturnable Your argument comes short in two major points. First of all, there are lots of people who are not actively choosing their browser or their preferences, as they are f.e. dependent on their companies IT unit. Second & much more important, 1.6% isn't 'an incredibly small minority (!) of people'. With a website like Amazon with around 10 million people every day estimated, it's 160.000 possible customers. So you don't wanna care about them? – Duffey

@VolkerE. These stats are now almost 4 years old and even smaller. And how many businesses do you know that are going to tell their blind employee they can't use a browser new enough to have modern screen reading technology? (HINT: They'd get sued) In addition, that 1.6% is NOT 1.6% of all people who visit a website like Amazon, it's 1.6% of people using screen readers. That IS an INCREDIBLY small minority of total users. Practically everyone who disables JS now does it by choice - even impaired people. It's time we let go of these old, incredibly outdated notions that we can't use Javascript! – Nonreturnable

+1 for getting your own stats! – Andy

@VolkerE. - I totally agree with your assessment. If catering to the 1% means an additional $100K of sales on your e-commerce site, and it costs $25K to make your site work without JavaScript, isn't that a no-brainer? – Jabez

@anon: True, though I guess that holds for sites with a significant user base and relatively deep pockets only, whereas I'd argue that I'd like that to be the case for most sites. Also, corporate image is something that can cost you a lot of money to repair, and alienating a section of your user base is generally a bad idea anyways. This is also a good argument to use when trying to convince a manager to fork a few more dollars for the development of even a largely degraded (but usable) version. – Warfourd

Answer 3

These stats are from one site but its a good, up-to-date number and also considers JavaScript disabled vs. JavaScript 'not received or run'.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/

In the interests of link-rot, the number was 1.1% with 0.9% of that where it was enabled in the browser but otherwise not run, due to reasons guessed to be things like corporate content filters, mobile network errors, and even page-preloading.

If we could find out what constitutes that 0.9% and how much is not a human sitting at an intentionally JS-disabled browser, then the effort and cost of investing in progressive enhancement/graceful degradation could be weakened.

In any case, it looks to be a tiny proportion.

Personally, my own opinion is that in 2014, it isn't worth the overhead to support this minority. I think its a bit like designing a door handle with consideration for the small minority of people have their hands full and need to use their foot, or just don't like touching door handles with their hands. Ugh, yucky JavaScript.

Although progressive enhancement is dead to me, I do think JS should be used sparingly, unless its a single-page app.

Ouster

+1 for an overview of the link. – Harappa

Answer 4

Since I ran into the same problem while looking for reliable javascript usage statistics, our company decided to collect its own data on the topic and I just thought some might find our findings interesting.

We serve largely german customers in all demographic areas with convenience services. About 20k page views a day, about 300k contracts signed online a year. We tracked all customers that signed a contract online while using our non-javascript version of the site.

We recently invested a large amount of time into non-js optimization and wanted to know whether the effort paid off. Turned out that exactly zero of our customers chose to sign a contract while having js disabled, while there are about 3% of non-js visits on our homepage. Thus I think that most of the traffic is generated by bots.

In conclusion, investing in non-js optimization was an utter failure for us, since it had no impact on our sales. Could be that there are some real people who choose to disable javascript but none of them seemed to be interested in buying stuff on the internet.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions

Salado

Hahaha, did you listen to users on Heise forum? All this geeks that tell you how everyone should use NoScript? – Boatwright

Your method wouldn't detect people who browsed through your site to with JS turned off, then turned it on when they wanted to make a purchase. That tends to be my behavior. +1 for sharing your stats, though. – Orcutt

Answer 5

Such statistics can only ever be useful for a specific site, and even then, there are cases hard to interpret:

• What about users that execute some, but not all scripts of a site?
• What about users that don’t execute scripts of a site most of the time, but occasionally execute all/some?

I have JavaScript disabled on almost all sites I visit. Sometimes I allow JS temporary, sometimes not at all. Sometimes I only allow some scripts temporary. Some scripts are allowed permanently, some scripts are disallowed permanently. Right now, typing this answer, some scripts on SO are blocked, some are allowed. How should statistics count me?

Other factors to consider:

• Sites that require JS, even if only for some parts, can only gather biased statistics, as they have probably already put off the no-JS visitors in the past.
• If your site is JS-free, you gather statistics, and then start to add JS, blacklisters (which had JS enabled before) might block (some of) your scripts.
• No-JS visitors are probably more sensitive to privacy, so it’s likely that they are taking other measures in addition … they might look like bots in site statistics ;)
• Site topic (what is your audience like and interested in?), browser stats (NoScript is one of the most popular Firefox add-ons.), country (The German Federal Office for Information Security strongly recommends¹ all citizens to install NoScript.) and also available competition on the market (if your site is unique and I really want to use it, I’ll allow scripts; otherwise, I go to your competitor) might have a strong influence.

---

¹ The BSI link is 404 now. Not sure if this recommendation is still somewhere on their site. For reference, here is the last snapshot of that page in the Internet Archive.

Stringendo

The "recommends" link (bsi-fuer-buerger.de/BSIFB/DE/SicherheitImNetz/SozialeNetze/…) is now dead – Suitcase

@andrewb: Thank you! I added a note and a link to an archived version. Couldn’t find this recommendation on their new site (I didn’t search much, though). – Stringendo

Answer 6

The statistics differ between different countries

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/stats-no-javascript.html

If you require javascript on your website then you will lose portion of your sales. Also some mobile devices are very slow when processing javascript and people will simply leave your website because browsing experience will be too slow.

Notion

This article is based off of the 2010 Yahoo! research the OP mentioned already. – Cychosz