A little while ago I tried to devise a reliable method for figuring out what proportion of browsers had javaScript disabled. My method sort of worked but then I discovered that Awstats (which is installed on all my sites) had a facility for determining whether visitors had javaScript disabled or not. To activate this functionality I needed to install the awstats_misc_tracker which was fairly straight forward, from then on I have been collecting the necessary data.
The results? After nearly 2 months of tracking I can say that about 2.5% have javaScript disabled, or 97.5% have javaScript enabled.
The website I have been tracking is a business and visitor guide to Stow on the Wold. I chose this site because it is fairly busy (about 4000 visitors per month) and because it very much a general purpose website with a wide cross-section of visitors. I suspect that a more technical site might show more people with javaScript disabled, my theory is that most people don’t want to disable javaScript and wouldn’t know how to disable it if they did want to.
Update 21st December 2011 – A few more months of data show the percentage with javaScript disabled fairly steady at about 3%. So about 97% of my visitors have javaScript enabled which is useful to know.