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The point you are missing is that users don't need to send an analytics ping for the page to load. If you were to conflate your jquery load with analytics so t

The point you are missing is that users don't need to send an analytics ping for the page to load. If you were to conflate your jquery load with analytics so that the page was broken, then you could prevent the use of ad-blockers (although you're just as likely to make people think your site is just broken). The use of bandwidth is a moot point. If advertisers hadn't abused the user's good will we wouldn't be where we are today, but there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

snowwrestler 11y ago
If we're talking about "need" then the conversation gets sticky pretty quickly. Users don't really need webfonts; text just needs to be readable. And they don't need to grab jquery from a CDN; it can come off the server. Heck, they don't need to grab anything from a CDN--the app server can serve images just as well as Cloudflare. Do users really need DDOS protection? No, that protects the server, not the user. And it banks their legitmate request--needlessly--through a proxy server, which certainly adds latency. Not to mention that Cloudflare can see everything they're browsing. Do users need single-page JS apps at all? Why not just render HTML4 on the server like in the good old days? So why do developers use these technologies? Because it makes the user experience better. And so do analytics. Without analytics, developers are flying blind. And no, Apache/Nginx logs don't capture the same data--especially with more advanced JS-heavy sites. Users want websites that load fast and are easy to use. It is impossible to build or improve such a site without data upon which to base decisions. That's why analytics are a necessity.
- pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  or, you know, you could pay a QA department to do the job correctly rather than looking over your users shoulders and forcing them to make after the fact requests that won't change their experience at all.

snowwrestler 11y ago

If we're talking about "need" then the conversation gets sticky pretty quickly. Users don't really need webfonts; text just needs to be readable. And they don't need to grab jquery from a CDN; it can come off the server. Heck, they don't need to grab anything from a CDN--the app server can serve images just as well as Cloudflare. Do users really need DDOS protection? No, that protects the server, not the user. And it banks their legitmate request--needlessly--through a proxy server, which certainly adds latency. Not to mention that Cloudflare can see everything they're browsing. Do users need single-page JS apps at all? Why not just render HTML4 on the server like in the good old days? So why do developers use these technologies? Because it makes the user experience better. And so do analytics. Without analytics, developers are flying blind. And no, Apache/Nginx logs don't capture the same data--especially with more advanced JS-heavy sites. Users want websites that load fast and are easy to use. It is impossible to build or improve such a site without data upon which to base decisions. That's why analytics are a necessity.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
or, you know, you could pay a QA department to do the job correctly rather than looking over your users shoulders and forcing them to make after the fact requests that won't change their experience at all.