Might depend on the setting. Do you know which setting it was that broke a bunch of sites for you? I suppose I’m back to asking for a reproducible scenario.
If you have some idea about what is or isn’t causing your browser issues, then let’s try to reproduce it. Once we pin down the exact cause, then we can decide whether the responsibility for addressing that scenario should fall on site owners or browser vendors or the user. But until we know the source of your problem, it seems inappropriate to lay all the blame on a particular web site.
No - and it isn’t a bunch of sites that are broken. The only sites I have noticed are broken are all Google ones. In most cases they work again if I turn off JavaScript so the problem appears to be with the JavaScript those Google sites use.
When I have checked on the type of JavaScript the sites use it looks like they use a lot of calls that were obsolete by the time Netscape 3 and IE3 came along. So it looks like their code doesn’t make any allowance for the many additional options that more modern browsers provide.
Except that there’s no problem to begin with in any browser for anyone but you. And it’s not just the Google sites, because you said, “More of the web works with JavaScript turned off than works with JavaScript turned on,” which also seems to be unique to your browsing experience. From where I sit, it looks very much like your customizations are the real culprit.
That includes all the web sites that use JavaScript correctly for progressive enhancement in both groups.
It also includes sites where the JavaScript is broken (for whatever reason) but where the site doen’t depend on JavaScript in the off group.
Those sites that depend on JavaScript but where the script is broken are in neither group.
So the off group would bigger than the on group even if there were only one page where the JavaScript is broken.
My comment was with respect to web pages and not web applications and so I wasn’t intending to include applications that require JavaScript to run in that comparison. Apologies if that led to the misunderstanding.
Anyway the customizations I have applied are settings provided by the browser - if it wasn’t considered valid to run the browser that way then why provide an easy to access option to change the setting. So if the settings are the cause then the sites that break are still responsible because they didn’t properly test in any of those browsers.