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Wow, he's a little pissed, isn't he? This is a good case of a third-party extension going wrong. Yeah, ideally it shouldn't happen, but I actually haven't seen

Wow, he's a little pissed, isn't he? This is a good case of a third-party extension going wrong. Yeah, ideally it shouldn't happen, but I actually haven't seen this effect on any other site - indeed, sites usually fail because of slooppy JS by the developer - depending on Google Analytics being there or something similar. Ideally, sites should not be totally dependent on external JS to work (what's going to happen when Analytics goes down!?) Honestly, I wish I didn't have to use this plugin. But whenever I'm not using it, I get immediately irritated by a lot of sites - it's not so much the tracking, which I'm pretty ambivalent about, but how slow and janky many sites become when they load so many scripts. Example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BVK2FLZCMAAkxKh.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BVK2FLZCMAAkxKh.png - totally nuts.

kosinus 13y ago
So an extension breaks a site, and the web developer is to blame for sloppy coding? How can he ever predict all extensions and different versions of extension visitors might have on their systems? Taking Google Analytics as an example, it guarantees the availability of `window._gaq = []`, even if the external resource fails to load. If an extension were to just detect and remove the script block, it'd kill the site. This is an innocent and unlikely example, because no extension actually does this. But extensions do other bad things much like it, and this post points out exactly one of those very bad things. It simply looks for a specific DOM element, then goes and deletes its parent from the page. But yes, websites that have an abundance of trackers are crap. Remember that it may also not have been the developers decision.
- matthewmacleod 13y ago
  So an extension breaks a site, and the web developer is to blame for sloppy coding? No - this is a case where the extension's at fault. Most of the cases I have seen, however, are sloppy coding. Remember that it may also not have been the developers decision. Well aware of that, given the number of times I've added the n-th external tracking bug to a client's website.
- hobs 13y ago
  The only thing I can say is degrade gracefully as possible. I am completely unwilling to unblock a sites main items (noscript user) unless there is a pressing need for their content, and there rarely is. (Also, his content works fine with noscript on. I dont get why ghostery would want to inject more content into a site, that does seem a bit ridiculous.) However, I dont blame the person who makes the site, we just have different priorities.

kosinus 13y ago

So an extension breaks a site, and the web developer is to blame for sloppy coding? How can he ever predict all extensions and different versions of extension visitors might have on their systems? Taking Google Analytics as an example, it guarantees the availability of `window._gaq = []`, even if the external resource fails to load. If an extension were to just detect and remove the script block, it'd kill the site. This is an innocent and unlikely example, because no extension actually does this. But extensions do other bad things much like it, and this post points out exactly one of those very bad things. It simply looks for a specific DOM element, then goes and deletes its parent from the page. But yes, websites that have an abundance of trackers are crap. Remember that it may also not have been the developers decision.

matthewmacleod 13y ago
So an extension breaks a site, and the web developer is to blame for sloppy coding? No - this is a case where the extension's at fault. Most of the cases I have seen, however, are sloppy coding. Remember that it may also not have been the developers decision. Well aware of that, given the number of times I've added the n-th external tracking bug to a client's website.
hobs 13y ago
The only thing I can say is degrade gracefully as possible. I am completely unwilling to unblock a sites main items (noscript user) unless there is a pressing need for their content, and there rarely is. (Also, his content works fine with noscript on. I dont get why ghostery would want to inject more content into a site, that does seem a bit ridiculous.) However, I dont blame the person who makes the site, we just have different priorities.