Today’s useful tool is StopTheScript, an extension that lets you block all JavaScript selectively across various domains. It is the penultimate step in the great cat-and-mouse game of technological eldritch horrors before I give up and Pi-hole my entire network – which, when it happens, will be extremely funny.

Blocking all JavaScript is a universally correct notion for all websites that never figured out how to monetize themselves, that failed to understand that the web is anticapitalist, and now choke themselves with all sorts of sundries & folderol. All of it fails when you turn off JavaScript. We have waited for this moment, no?

Sometimes I see only two paragraphs of text, but who cares, enough to get the jist. Other times I see a single sentence that admonishes me to turn JavaScript back on, at which point I calmly recognize that they don’t want me poking in there and so I simply block the whole domain. Most of the time, though, it just works. Feels like 1997 again. Clean field.

You don’t want to turn this thing on everywhere, though, since almost all of the other doings-on the web require JavaScript. You still want to shop at stores and work with other software. But man, that whole informational corner. Woof. We require blunt instruments now.

I run seven other content blockers these days, which is also funny. I don’t even know what a couple of them do. I think one of them is exclusively for cookie banners? Life is a mystery. Things work well enough across all of my devices, and I never uninstall them. It makes QA’ing interesting for my clients.

In short, JavaScript was a bad idea and we must remove it now.