How to detect if JavaScript is disabled?

Question

There was a post this morning asking about how many people disable JavaScript. Then I began to wonder what techniques might be used to determine if the user has it disabled.

Does anyone know of some short/simple ways to detect if JavaScript is disabled? My intention is to give a warning that the site is not able to function properly without the browser having JS enabled.

Eventually I would want to redirect them to content that is able to work in the absence of JS, but I need this detection as a placeholder to start.

Answer 1

If your use case is that you have a form (e.g., a login form) and your server-side script needs to know if the user has JavaScript enabled, you can do something like this:

<form onsubmit="this.js_enabled.value=1;return true;">
    <input type="hidden" name="js_enabled" value="0">
    <input type="submit" value="go">
</form>

This will change the value of js_enabled to 1 before submitting the form. If your server-side script gets a 0, no JS. If it gets a 1, JS!

Answer 2

Check for cookies using a pure server side solution i have introduced here then check for javascript by dropping a cookie using Jquery.Cookie and then check for cookie this way u check for both cookies and javascript

Answer 3

This is the "cleanest" solution id use:

<noscript>
    <style>
        body *{ /*hides all elements inside the body*/
            display: none;
        }
        h1{ /* even if this h1 is inside head tags it will be first hidden, so we have to display it again after all body elements are hidden*/
            display: block;
        }
    </style>
    <h1>JavaScript is not enabled, please check your browser settings.</h1>
</noscript>

Answer 4

To force users to enable JavaScripts, I set 'href' attribute of each link to the same document, which notifies user to enable JavaScripts or download Firefox (if they don't know how to enable JavaScripts). I stored actual link url to the 'name' attribute of links and defined a global onclick event that reads 'name' attribute and redirects the page there.

This works well for my user-base, though a bit fascist ;).

Answer 5

This is what worked for me: it redirects a visitor if javascript is disabled

<noscript><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=whatyouwant.html" /></noscript>

Answer 6

You might, for instance, use something like document.location = 'java_page.html' to redirect the browser to a new, script-laden page. Failure to redirect implies that JavaScript is unavailable, in which case you can either resort to CGI ro utines or insert appropriate code between the tags. (NOTE: NOSCRIPT is only available in Netscape Navigator 3.0 and up.)

credit http://www.intranetjournal.com/faqs/jsfaq/how12.html