Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose’s ‘The 49MB Web Page’

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.

There would be no 49 MB web pages without scripting. There would be no surveillance tracking industrial complex. The text on a page is visible. The images and video embedded on a page are visible. You see them. JavaScript is invisible. That makes it seem OK to do things that are not OK at all.

In my piece riffing on Bose’s “The 49MB Web Page” yesterday, I reiterated my also-longstanding argument that publications with print editions do things with their websites that they’d never in a million years do with their print editions. The way The New York Times uses JavaScript to present popovers that obstruct reading the actual article text would be the equivalent of them gluing pages together in the print edition, using tape labeled with an advertisement. They wouldn’t do that. But they do the equivalent, using JavaScript, on every page of their website.

★ Thursday, 19 March 2026