I think that Urchin was the basis for GA. Urchin is still available from google here though http://www.google.com/urchin/. The main difference that I know of between them is that Urchin has the ability to parse server logs as well as track users through javascript.
There's an easy solution here: Load Google Analytics locally. There's no urgent need to load ga.js from Google's servers; there are benefits, namely speed, utilizing client cache, and getting updates, but its core functionality does not rely on where ga.js comes from.
Then, the only resource loaded form Google's servers is http://ssl.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif, and that's just loaded via a new Image(), so even if you MITM that resource request, it doesn't execute as a script or anything similar.
There's also an old Omniture tag, with a copyright notice from 2008. Omniture was acquired by Adobe around that time, and was renamed to Adobe Analytics almost a decade ago.
The other pages have Google Tag Manager (first released 2012) installed. However the container fails to load, as either the account or container has since been deleted.
I'm slightly surprised there's no old Urchin tags floating around, then the site would be a kind of museum of web analytics services.
It doesn’t? I’m confused I mean no one used pure HTML anymore everyone has at least some JavaScript GA is a JavaScript file that can be used to track people pretty reliably.
Pure html nowadays is paradoxically harder to maintain though.
I like GA4, but never got around to removing google-analytics.com/analytics.js. You mean GA4 doesn't need that now to function and I've been loading it for nothing all this time? I'll look into removing that one.
And normally I set all images to loading='lazy', I just realized from your comment that for this post I hadn't. Great catch, and fixed it already.
I'm not convinced the defined track function is fixing what's described. If following Google's instruction for "installing" ga.js [0], there shouldn't be any sites breaking that block ga.js from loading. That is, Google suggests var _gaq = _gaq || []; at the start of the script installation. If ga.js never loads, _gaq is still an array and can be pushed onto to your heart's content. If you're concerned with an ever growing array of garbage, the suggestion in the comments is great:
Most of my users are blocking GA these days. I don't put it on new sites anymore. Crawlers from a certain country do execute GA js. This causes stats to vary wildly.
Not sure if it will be worth my time to go back and remove the old tags from those sites. Cannot see a reason to upgrade.
It was nice to know, but there are more important metrics.
The multivariate testing suite was fun at one time. However it isn't as useful when your core users are all blocking it.
From the page source:
"We only use GA on our Home and Invite pages to view where traffic is coming from as we prepare for beta. We will be removing GA and all third party sourced scripts from the site afterwards. - Jason"
One of the places I use GA is on my blog which is hosted on Github Pages. There's no server (which I can access). Without js tracking (GA or not) what you've left with is something along the lines of putting it behind Cloudflare and seeing the little you get there.
Ironically on the other hand, services like Cloudflare are also what makes server logs less useful in some cases - users might not hit your servers at all for you to record them there.
A small point (although I don't claim it militates against the central impulse of the article), is that serving analytics.js through gtag.js is obviously going to inflate the tag size unnecessarily. The latter is a unified interface for all of Google's various page snippets. Also, though not recommended, there's no reason you can't self-host GA, although practically speaking Google-hosted GA is likelier cached more often and on pretty snappy geolocated servers.
Yeah, I got a little carried away ranting. It's probably reasonable to make sure your page works if GA doesn't load. There may be other third-party scripts that the developer views as essential but the user doesn't.
I found this searching for "google analytics stub": http://ejohn.org/blog/fixing-google-analytics-for-ghostery/ . Supposedly Ghostery was already stubbing it in 2013. They might be missing some stubs for certain scripts though, because I've had something break 6-8 weeks ago, and it worked when I disabled Ghostery and refreshed.
https://google-analytics.com/urchin.js
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