This article was first published by Julie Marchant under the license CC BY-SA 4.0.

In Richard Stallman's essay, "The JavaScript Trap", it is pointed out that people run proprietary software which is silently, automatically installed into their browsers every day. In fact, he very much downplayed the problem; not only are most users running proprietary programs every day merely by browsing the Web, they are running dozens or even hundreds of such programs each day. The JavaScript Trap is very real and prolific; the Web is said to be so broken without these non-standard, usually proprietary extensions to HTML that Web browsers have moved toward not even offering an obvious option to disable JavaScript; disabling JavaScript, it is argued, will only cause confusion.

It's obvious that we need to solve this problem. However, in focusing on whether or not scripts are "trivial" or libre, Mr. Stallman misses a crucial point: this behavior of automatic, silent software installation is, itself, the main problem. That most of the software in question is proprietary is merely a side-effect.

Keep reading Fix or kill automatically installed JavaScript?