Comment by nindalf
5 years ago
People use analytics to decide where to focus there efforts. For example, if most of your users are on mobile, invest more in the mobile experience. The unintended consequence of this change is people looking at which browsers are hitting their website, finding that it’s mostly Chrome and therefore testing only with Chrome. This would degrade the experience for Firefox users as subtle breakages start appearing.
Folks advocating for the use of hosted analytics instead of GA are correct ... but that’s not what most people will do. It’s just simpler to add a one line GA tracker to your code and call it a day. And these people will see Firefox usage drop to 0.
We have already seen “this site works best/only on Chrome”, especially on Google products like Inbox. Expect to see more of that as the web becomes a Chromium/Safari duopoly, according to analytics.
You don't need Google Analytics to figure out what browser your audience is using. That information is literally embedded in every single request to your website. There's no need to siphon requests over to Google for something so trivial.
I get that people would like you know as much as possible about who visits their website. Sometimes even for legitimate reasons and not just out of an obsession with collection as much data as possible. But this analytics madness has gone too far. Pretty much every website you visit ships a bunch of data about you to multiple third parties. Often without consent. Just stop doing that. It's not a hard thing to do.
> You don’t need GA
No, but it’s what people use. Let’s not ignore reality.
That doesn’t give you shiny graphs with no effort though.
This is hardly new, people have been using ad blockers and various other scripts for years to block GA et el. In my experience it's something which PMs and other key decision makers are already well aware of. If there are still companies out there basing all of their decisions on GA metrics that's really their problem.
The unintended consequence of this change is people looking at which browsers are hitting their website, finding that it’s mostly Chrome and therefore testing only with Chrome.
Bad developers already only test in Chrome regardless of what GA is telling them. This won't have much impact there.
It’s harder for good developers to justify effort if it seems like that effort has no impact.