Frames are horrid for all sorts of reasons. Of course they are widely supported by browsers because they have been around for a long time and many sites that use them, but that's not a reason to use them in any new site.

I used to do frames for consistent navigation menus across all pages, but I stopped that 10 years ago when I discovered PHP. Responsiveness is easy with PHP and CSS (especially CSS3).
I've never used layers or Javascript.