Turning off JavaScript in the browser

Websites cater to users using browsers of varying capabilities on a plethora of devices. Consequently, there is no guarantee that user experiences will always be the same across the board. Graceful degradation is often a term associated with site usability and accessibility, and ensures that sites are still functional in the absence of key technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, images, and plugins such as Flash. Disabling various browser features is also quite frequently an essential step during debugging.

This recipe will detail the steps required to disable JavaScript during development.

Getting ready

While every browser provides a JavaScript toggle somewhere in its preferences dialogs, and many of them are beginning to provide handy developer tools of their own, we will be using the Web Developer add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome which can be downloaded from http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. It is assumed that it has been installed and...