  While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it
also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical
privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose
to systematically block scripts reported by crowdsourced trackers lists.
However, this solution heavily depends on the quality of these built-in lists,
which may be deprecated or incomplete, thus exposing the visitor to unknown
trackers. In this paper, we explore a different strategy, by investigating the
benefits of disabling JavaScript in the browser. More specifically, by adopting
such a strict policy, we aim to quantify the JavaScript addiction of web
elements composing a web page, through the observation of web breakages. As
there is no standard mechanism for detecting such breakages, we introduce a
framework to inspect several page features when blocking JavaScript, that we
deploy to analyze 6,384 pages, including landing and internal web pages. We
discover that 43% of web pages are not strictly dependent on JavaScript and
that more than 67% of pages are likely to be usable as long as the visitor only
requires the content from the main section of the page, for which the user most
likely reached the page, while reducing the number of tracking requests by 85%
on average. Finally, we discuss the viability of currently browsing the web
without JavaScript and detail multiple incentives for websites to be kept
usable without JavaScript.
