Blocking JavaScript on Your Phone: How and When

The Internet would look vastly different without JavaScript. This programming language powers things like audio and video players, infinite scrolling, and chat boxes. It lets your favorite websites look the way they do. That all may sound innocent, but JavaScript has a dark side too. With the tracking features that JavaScript enables, sometimes it’s better to surf the web after blocking JavaScript — especially on your phone. With JavaScript, developers can add complex and interactive features to websites. It’s considered one of the fundamental layers of website programming languages, along with HTML and CSS. HTML helps define the basic structure of a site and CSS allows you to add style elements like colors, fonts, and layouts. For any type of dynamic content that goes beyond HTML and CSS, you need JavaScript. Some examples of what web developers can add to a website using JavaScript include: JavaScript is a powerful scripting language that lets you accomplish almost anything you want to do with your website (it does have some limitations). You may wonder why you should disable it in your browser at all. Although the point of JavaScript is to improve user experience on websites, it does have some downsides. Website owners use JavaScript to show ads and enable ad tracking. By disabling JavaScript, you can avoid these annoyances while maintaining some of your privacy. There are a few other pros to disabling JavaScript on your browser as well: As previously mentioned, JavaScript isn’t all bad. In fact, there are a few disadvantages to disabling it on your browser: Now that you know the pros and cons of disabling JavaScript on your web browser, it’s up to you to decide what’s best for you. If you’d rather not let websites track you and don’t mind sacrificing some usability on your phone’s web browser, then you can disable JavaScript on your phone. One thing to note is that the Firefox browser does not allow you to disable JavaScript on Android or iPhone. Safari and Chrome, however, will allow it. iPhone To disable JavaScript on Safari, follow these steps: If you are using Chrome on an iPhone, you cannot disable JavaScript. Android To disable JavaScript on Chrome, follow these steps: If you like your privacy and don’t want ad trackers following you, disabling JavaScript is one way to approach it. But you will sacrifice some usability on many websites, and if that’s bothersome for you, there are other ways to tackle ad trackers on your phone : As you can see, disabling and re-enabling JavaScript is very simple to do on iPhone and Android. If you start surfing the web without it and realize that you’d rather not give up usability, you can always turn it back on. Whether you enable it or not, it’s important to know what JavaScript is and how it works on your computer and phone. Now that you know what this programming language is used for, you can make an informed decision about whether to switch it off or not.