getting back to the original question. if javascript is a concern switch over to a CSS based nav menu.
WRT to caffiene. as i said in a post (still waiting to be moderator approved) caffiene is a infrastructure update. Google has never made a algo change / update public. and they never will. as bradrap said the SERPs are the same in both. caffeine pre roll out data center can be found here: 209.85.225.103
Yes, Google will never announce the changes though this does not mean they're present. From what I know the only changes being made in Caffeine is that irrelevant content further down the line (like pages 10+) will not show up in searches. There's also been rumours about faster loading pages gaining some benefit though I've found no evidence to prove this yet.