What made people turn JavaScript off in 2005?

[Thank The Cheese]

Hello everyone,

I've been asked to give a lecture at a university in a few weeks on accessible web scripting (in front of 230 people! crapping myself, but let's move on...).

Part of it will be talking about JavaScript, and they way it is so often abused to the point of impacting accessibility and usability. In my research I found a fascinating fact from theCounter.com:

In 2005, the amount of people using browsers that did not support JavaScript (or had JS support disabled) went from 9% in January, down to 3% in June. But then in July it shot up to 10%, where it stayed for the rest of the year (ending at 9% in December).

From 3% to 10% in a month?!

This could be an interesting fact to bring up, as it points out it is never safe to presume your users have JS enabled, but I'd like to know what happened.

My theory is that sometime in June there was a massive media beat-up about computer viruses, and a lot of people panicked and turned off JavaScript out of fear.

Do you think that could be right? And if so, what do you think it was the triggered the scare?

Really appreciate the help

 

[Mikuro]

No idea. But I can speak for myself. Personally, I like to turn off all web services that are not vital, because I can't think of a single one that isn't abused to work against me, the user, mostly in the form of obtrusive ads (pop up windows, flash movies, animated gifs, iframes...the list goes on).

Another reason I turn off JS is that some sites, like Gmail, have a separate JS-free version that's actually a lot more usable. (Which says a lot about Google's designers....) These days I use PithHelmet to disable JavaScript for Gmail while leaving it on for (most) other sites. But I still turn it off frequently, and I have a lot of it disabled in general through PithHelmet (for example, timed events and pop-under links).