Mobile (iOS) pages blank with JS disabled

If I have Javascript disabled in iOS Safari, content just isn’t rendered: The homepage is blank and topic pages display only the title and category without any text content. I’m seeing this behavior on my own site as well as Meta:

Tested on iOS 16.5, as well as macOS Safari with an iOS user agent set.

Edit: I’m also seeing this with an Android/Chrome user agent set.

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@Falco / @david I believe this is the optimisation we have for mobile where we don’t send the full payload to save on traffic?

Feels deliberate, but maybe there is something we can do here longer term and force a redirect or something for cases like these? (redirect to ?javascript_disabled or something…)

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Yes, that’s exactly it. The trade-off is better performance for 99.999% of users, with saves for both network usage and user battery, but people who disable JS on their modern smarthphones don’t get the static HTML version.

Force a redirect with a meta tag? Maybe we render a button on the else of this if here

that reloads the current page with a parameter and/or setting a cookie?

Considering the impact here, and the work needed, I’d say it’s low priority work and pr-welcome.

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