Why would Sony care about GameStop’s share price? Physical stores already are using the shelf space for more profitable things. GameStop’s shelf space is like 90% not-games now, plus they’re closing down tons of physical locations to focus on online sales.

Physical games still exist because they’d lose too many sales if they exclusively sold digital games. Otherwise, they’d happily stop selling physical games since they make less money for every physical game sold. Money gained from digital-only sales is less than money lost from pissed off customers not buying your console or games at all, so they keep physical games.

PC is not cheaper because there are no physical games, lol. How would less options and less competition lower prices? PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. This article is literally about Sony restricting digital sales to their own store so they can have a monopoly and artificially raise prices.

Blatantly incorrect

Sure, but this is specifically about consoles. They don’t have the same open market that PC digital games have so the only way to not be price gouged is buying physical.

Bluray is extremely scratch resistant. I’m sure there are extreme cases, but scratched disks haven’t been a problem for 15+ years.

Lmao. I primarily game on PC. I own hundreds of digital games. Even with it’s superior sales and open market, PC struggles to beat buying a used game from marketplace or ebay.

Also, are you seriously dissing physical media? The benefits of actually owning something cannot be overstated. Even with Steam, you’re technically just buying a revokable license to play a game. Physical media can not be revoked, it can be resold/shared, and it works offline. See: the recent PSN outage where people were locked out of their digital games for a few days.

Plus, having a physical collection is just plain fuckin cool.

Hence why nobody should ever buy the digital-only edition of a console. You buy like one used game and make the money back. Then, you can sell that game once you’re done and turn a profit over digital-only.

Tape is still the cheapest option for mass amounts of storage since the actual tapes are so cheap. You just need to store enough data to offset the cost of the drive. Drive cost increases very quickly the higher you go in storage density.

Key word is “watching”. They’re more than happy to have an audience as long as they get what they want. And they do and they are.

Fret not! Lots and lots of apps are just PWAs packaged into thin wrappers so they can be distributed through an app store. Humanity gets all, or at least most, of the benefits of the web with unmatched cross-platform support, and our Grandmothers and 12 year olds still get to tap on the Spotify and Starbucks icons. Win-win!

Interesting that that is the workflow that works best for you. I’ve personally always found it a much better experience to do my searching/browsing off of the server and wget whatever I need to download. If that’s truly your situation, then you may just need to use another browser that supports JS or use a different search engine. I prefer DDG anyway, lol. Not a huge deal.

You’ve seriously been in situations where you had no access to the internet except through a terminal, and you had to do a google search? No phone or other computer that you’re remoting in from?

Even so, there are terminal-based browsers that support javascript like brow.sh or links (not lynx).

I doubt the nothing-but-terminal users comprise a significant enough portion of Google’s userbase to justify the extra costs to test and maintain non-JS functionality.

I think this isn’t a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don’t want to let the few people that don’t have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.

It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can’t let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.

Search suggestions require JS. Also, why would Google spend the resources supporting the 5 people that block JS when virtually all websites and users rely on JS. This is a nothingburger of a story.

Google is a lot more than just the one google.com page. And even if it were, JS adds some nice features like predective text / suggested searches.

Tracking, ads, and AI can be done without JS. They may be slightly less granular in the same way as the user experience will be slightly worse, but disabling JS won’t stop it.

I’d bet the biggest reason Google decided to do this is so that they don’t have to support a version of the site that virtually nobody uses.

Imo, the most compelling reason for non-JS versons of typically JS-driven sites is to support lower power devices. But it’s 2025 and even a 10 year old phone you found in a dumpster behind a decaying Radio Shack can run modern websites without issue.

Even the article is grasping at straws for why this might be bad. “It might make accessibility more difficult or add security issues”. One of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the best engineers in the world, is going to have problems adding aria attributes and updating dependencies? Give me a break.

If you want to block tracking, ads, and “AI”, there are plenty of ways to do that without disabling literally all JS. If you want to construct your google search request without the rest of the stuff on google.com, use your browser’s search bar.

I’m as anti-google/tracking/etc as the next guy, and I’ve been using DDG almost exclusively for years, but I’m not going to pretend like asking companies to make HTML/CSS-only versions of their sites is a reasonable request in the modern web environment. It can be really fun and cool to build a site without JS, but there aren’t many scenarios where it’s actually beneficial.

The replies in this thread are just plain ignorant. Basically every website uses JS heavily and disabling all JS with something like noscript is just a plain bad time.

Even in your comment, every sentence is wrong. Google searches are done with GET requests, and there are plenty of reasons to force JS other than tracking, ads, and ai.

Honestly, JS is such a core part of the web, I’m surprised it took this long.

Oh, and “other AI CEO agrees, saying just imagine a world where everyone uses our AI, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Company selling AI snake oil claims that they will maybe consider possibly using AI to run their business maybe and not immediately rehire the engineers they laid off only a few months ago, definitely because of the AI and not for any other reason.”

And

“Our custom AI has revolutionized the way we do business and saved us millions! No, you can’t see how.”