This is an infuriatingly poor error message if the problem is disabled JavaScript. Surely they can detect that and show a proper error instead of trying to be cute with this "Your browser is a bit unusual" junk?

The error message linked from the post says "Try disabling ad blockers, enabling JavaScript or using a different web browser".

This feels to me like they used too many abstraction layers to know what the exact error is in the place where the error message is shown.

If you want intentionally misrender the page, that's your right. But it's not their job to debug your setup.

The error message isn't "you have the wrong user-agent" and the recommended steps aren't "use official Chrome" though. These were all assumptions about the error the OP made other people here have already disproven.

All the error message says is to disable extensions or try a different browser. It doesn't say what went wrong and it certainly doesn't say anything about needing specific user-agents, hell it doesn't even recommend which browser to switch to it just says "try another browser". As someone already mentioned it's not the site's job to figure out how your browser loaded the page wrong just to tell you it did.

I use brave and the ad blocker is on by default.

It's hard to differentiate between completely disabled JavaScript, some individual JavaScript files being blocked by an (overzealous?) ad blocker, and the browser not implementing some required JavaScript feature.

I've been using NoScript for about a month full-time.. and it's insane the things you can leave blocked and still see a site as it's meant to be. Ads, trackers and internal tools that somehow I have to contribute my data to, and their accompanying libraries EASILY make up 70% of all JS.

> Ads, trackers and internal tools that somehow I have to contribute my data to, and their accompanying libraries EASILY make up 70% of all JS.

Citation needed. Literally 100% of the JS code i've written over the past 24 years has been 100% free of "ads, trackers, and internal tools that somehow users have to contributor their data to."

> Citation needed. Literally 100% of the JS code i've written over the past 24 years has been 100% free of "ads, trackers, and internal tools that somehow users have to contributor their data to."

It's a fair assumption that the majority of the code on the internet probably isn't written by you, so what you or any other individual writes isn't exactly a counter-argument.

I'd assume the poster you replied to was referring to the Javascript that gets delivered to their browser on a day to day basis by general purpose web sites, for which a significant percentage being ads and related unwanted content is entirely plausible.

If you were to capture all of the Javascript delivered to a randomly selected person's browser during a normal day I would easily believe somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of that Javascript was things that if the user was given a real choice they would not choose to load.

Actually it's trivial to detect if JS was completely blocked with the <noscript> tag. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/no...

And on the flip side you can trivially detect if some .js file was blocked from loading with some inline <script> tag that checks for whatever the .js file should expose.

The third case with the browser not implementing some feature is a bit more work but usually also rather easy to do.

I don't envy web developers, that's a difficult situation.

I still stand by that the error message could be a lot clearer regardless.

The message is clear enough. It's intended for people who don't know much. Not people who mess with the browser features.

<script src="https://example.com/js"> is not an experimental web platform feature.