"But also nearly cripple a site's functionality aside from static content pages.
Even plain text pages aren't immune from the Javascript curse. I've said this before, but Google's blogger/blogspot service is one of the worst offenders. For example, here is the official Android blog from Google
As you can easily re-enable it with any decent browser (Opera 12 is great) that is no issue since if you actually want to have a site to have interactive features on its pages, just enable it. Otherwise, you get soothing, plain, static content. Most sites to not require Javascript for reading text or looking at images.
It is pretty refreshing to load a page and have it usable within fractions of a second, instead of it having to go and fetch an untold number of external scripts, initialize and create the widgets and objects, etc. Not to mention that sites with auto-play A/V are prevented from blaring at you without your permission.
"Easy" is in the eye of the beholder. "Close tab" is even easier to do; and very little of Internet's content is actually unique (as in "cannot be obtained from a non-scummy site").
That's why we have add-ons like NoScript for Firefox (or the similar NotScripts for Chrome) that let you selectively white-list JavaScript from just the sites you need. Even if some site requires JavaScript to load, it almost surely doesn't require JavaScript hosted from Facebook or Twitter or Google Analytics to be functional.
Ads can't be effective, if you'd made a product that was better than what I use, and specifically targeted at me, via magic(?), I'd already know about it because I would have read a review. Ads are just lies. But the question was about popups asking you to sign up, do a survey, etc. I already block ads.
