Ghostery and website tracking, etc.

Jul 4, 2014 - PandoDaily - I just installed a tool which shows how popular websites are spying on me. The results are horrifying

When JavaScript is disabled, a website, especially a media-based site, loads considerably quicker. Instead of taking several seconds to load when JavaScript is enabled, the site will load in under a second with JavaScript disabled. And as long as the content of the article is displayed, that's all the matters.

If the JavaScript was used only to help the user, that would be okay. But a lot of the crap is ad-based, tracking-based, etc. Cruft.

Some of the JavaScript, however, is meant to improve the user experience, but too many sites are bogging themselves down with trying to create a native app-like experience in the browser. So on older machines, the heavy JavaScript sites use more CPU.

From the PandoDaily article:

What I didn’t know is how absolutely out of control the number of trackers on popular sites has become. It’s actually horrifying.

Earlier today I met with an entrepreneur who is working on some neat-sounding software that allows us to improve our “related articles” recommendations for readers. To prove how many different sites already use his software, he showed me the results from a browser extension called Ghostery which shows which trackers are embedded in any given page.

Every site he visited contained at least one piece of tracking code, but some showed dozens. That’s dozens of different companies, or divisions of companies, watching you every time you visit a single web page. Those creepy ads that follow you from site to site, reminding you about products you once looked at? Yeah — that’s one tracker. Imagine how much a dozen trackers know about you.

https://www.ghostery.com/en/ - browser plug-in.

The browser that I use the most on my laptop is Chrome.

When I want to surf the web with JavaScript disabled, I use Firefox, since I have JavaScript disabled globally in the browser.

In Chrome, I have rules setup to disable JavaScript for a few sites, such as the ToledoBlade.com.

Reading the Blade website with JavaScripe enabled is a horrible experience. The Blade uses too many slide-down and slide-in adds. When copying text, it adds that "read more" crap to the copied text like many media sites do.

The Toledo Blade website will take several seconds to load with JavaScript enabled, even for an article page. It's terrible. It's piggish. But an article page will load nearly instantly with JavaScript disabled. It's a much better experience.

Maybe this media sites should offer paying customers a version of their site without all the JavaScript crap.