Question

I’m wondering just how pervasive JavaScript is. This article states that 73% of websites they tested rely on JavaScript for important functionality, but it seems to me that the number must be larger. Have any surveys been done on this topic?

Maybe a better way to phrase this question is – are there any sites that don’t use JavaScript?

EDIT: By ‘use’, I don’t necessarily mean “rely on for important functionality” – that was just the statistic that one article gave.

EDIT: I wrote a script to check out the top 500 most visited sites according to alexa.com and see if they contain a <script> tag. Out of the 483 sites that actually loaded, only 2 of them did not on their front page: craigslist.org and wikimedia.org. However, any pages past their front page did use JavaScript. Is this a representative sample?

Answer 1

There are only 100 web sites that are in the list of top 100 websites, and they count for only a measly percentage of all websites. A fabulous percentage of websites are rarely visited. Because they have few users, the receive little testing and even less complaint from users that need it to work without javascript, or with a version different from what the developer happened to use.

Maybe the worst part of it is these sites make use of all sorts of showy bling in the form of Javascript and flash to look interesting or important.

Core functionality in these cases is really just basic site navigation.