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Firefox users now invisible to webmasters that use Google Analytics

15 points by TekMol 7y ago

TekMol 7y ago
As someone who runs a website and is a Firefox user, I have mixed feelings about this. So now nobody who uses Firefox will be part of my statistics. There might be a million people like me visiting my website tomorrow and I won't notice. My website might have a 90% bounce rate among my fellow Firefox users and I won't notice. Now I wonder if I should ditch GA completely and look for a different solution. Since my site is delivered via a CDN, that would probably mean capturing raw logs via the CDN and then downloading and analyzing them locally with some software I would have to install? Damn, that feels so 90s :) And it would be quite a lot of work to switch to the new process.
- duiker101 7y ago
  Honestly, I recently moved from GA to a self hosted Matomo in an effort to stop using Google as much as I can and I am very happy. For a power user it might not be enough but for me, just to have a general idea about the usage of my (small) websites, I am very happy.
- thekyle 7y ago
  This kind of reminds me of how power users often disable analytics but then get upset when companies remove power user features because the analytics show that nobody uses them.
onyva 7y ago
To keep in mind when wondering why Brave is so heavily promoted by some media outlets before Firefox, in particular when talking about user privacy online and pushback against surveillance capitalism.
thebeerholder 7y ago
"According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners." Seems like most of the basic GA data will still be available to site owners. It's the remarketing features that are affected.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
The article has been amended at the end to say that the headline isn't correct. "UPDATE: According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners. 'The analytics functionality of GA (as used to prepare reports for a site owner) is a 1st-party cookie. So users will still count toward a site’s GA stats, like users of Apple ITP.'"
- TekMol 7y ago
  What does that even mean? Is the Google Analytics script executed or not? The way I interpret the info I see in my recent Firefox is that it is not. Because it is marked as blocked. Update: Oh wow, I get it now! This "blocking" of "trackers" is just discarding some cookies. Not preventing the execution of the javascript of the tracker. Lol. So it's a lot of noise about nothing.

15 points by TekMol 7y ago

As someone who runs a website and is a Firefox user, I have mixed feelings about this. So now nobody who uses Firefox will be part of my statistics. There might be a million people like me visiting my website tomorrow and I won't notice. My website might have a 90% bounce rate among my fellow Firefox users and I won't notice. Now I wonder if I should ditch GA completely and look for a different solution. Since my site is delivered via a CDN, that would probably mean capturing raw logs via the CDN and then downloading and analyzing them locally with some software I would have to install? Damn, that feels so 90s :) And it would be quite a lot of work to switch to the new process.

duiker101 7y ago
Honestly, I recently moved from GA to a self hosted Matomo in an effort to stop using Google as much as I can and I am very happy. For a power user it might not be enough but for me, just to have a general idea about the usage of my (small) websites, I am very happy.
thekyle 7y ago
This kind of reminds me of how power users often disable analytics but then get upset when companies remove power user features because the analytics show that nobody uses them.

onyva 7y ago

To keep in mind when wondering why Brave is so heavily promoted by some media outlets before Firefox, in particular when talking about user privacy online and pushback against surveillance capitalism.

thebeerholder 7y ago

"According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners." Seems like most of the basic GA data will still be available to site owners. It's the remarketing features that are affected.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

The article has been amended at the end to say that the headline isn't correct. "UPDATE: According to a Firefox developer most of Google Analytics’ data will be unaffected, which is great news for SEOs and site owners. 'The analytics functionality of GA (as used to prepare reports for a site owner) is a 1st-party cookie. So users will still count toward a site’s GA stats, like users of Apple ITP.'"

TekMol 7y ago
What does that even mean? Is the Google Analytics script executed or not? The way I interpret the info I see in my recent Firefox is that it is not. Because it is marked as blocked. Update: Oh wow, I get it now! This "blocking" of "trackers" is just discarding some cookies. Not preventing the execution of the javascript of the tracker. Lol. So it's a lot of noise about nothing.