Browsers with JS disabled

Question

Years ago I used to design with JavaScript disabled browsers in mind. How important is it nowadays?

Is it really something you need to worry about? I've never come across a user in real life who has JavaScript disabled. Anyone got any figures?

Answer 1

Having had my own company for a year and working at another for a couple of years, none of my direct clients has ever had JavaScript disabled, in one single instance I've had one of my clients customers have JavaScript disabled, so my current guess (purely anecdotal evidence) is about 1/50.000.

My biggest worry when working with JavaScript is and has always been cross browser compliance, what works in FF doesn't always work in Chrome, what works in FF and Chrome doesn't always work in IE 8, and what works in all of the above... doesn't always work in IE 7.....

And then there is IE 6.

Edit, yay data: By July 31, 2009 firefox had 1 billion downloads

Noscript has as of September 14, 2010 73 million downloads

That tells us that about 7% of the times FF users has downloaded the browser, they have also installed the noscript plugin.

Edit addendum Making this community wiki, add your math people.

Edit:

In October 2010, Yahoo! published actual stats.

In short, the answer varies by country, but for a US site, you can expect 2% of your users to have javascript disabled.

Answer 2

My tips would be:

Designing a site with a fallback to no JS is usually entirely possible and not all that difficult. You should consider doing it, regardless of what the statistics about JS-disabled browsers say.

However, don't let this stop you from being creative. If you must rely on JS and there's no workaround, don't hesitate. If someone wants full browsing experience and works with JS off, it's his/her fault.

Encoding emails using JS unescape() is always a good idea. In a JS-disabled browser, just display nothing.