“Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what me may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty.
The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010
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Goodbye Google Analytics, StatCounter, and SiteMeter
Published Fri, Aug 1 2008 11:33 PM
Technorati Tags: Annoyances
I've temporarily removed the Google Analytics, StatCounter, and SiteMeter code from my site. I've always been suspicious of needlessly obfuscated code that inserts tags into page markup. I tried doing an analysis of the Google Analytics code once and didn't care for what I saw.
After watching Internet Explorer crash while using it to view my site from two different machines today while Firefox and Opera worked just fine I started wondering what was going on. Well, I found out. Some Javascript code that manipulates the document object model (DOM) causes Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 to go haywire if the document isn't fully loaded. I tried using the "defer" attribute on the scripts that cause the problem with no luck. The code used by these three lovely widgets exposes a bug in Internet Explorer's HTML parsing code. The bug is still present in Internet Explorer version 8, but they've done a better job of recovering with the new browser.
About the only code that inserts elements into the DOM on my site now is the Dumb Ox Bloggregator. I've temporarily taken the rest of it down until I can figure out why it causes Internet Explorer to hurl. Any one of these three tools will cause the error you see above in Internet Explorer. What mystifies me is that the Bloggregator uses the same techniques as these other three tools to insert code into the site, and it still works.
This is one of the reasons I stopped using Internet Explorer as my primary browser some time ago. They insist upon saying that their browser is exhibiting the right behavior. I hardly call crashing proper behavior. I much prefer using Firefox for most things anyway. It's CSS compliance is far better than Internet Explorer's for one thing. It's also more stable.
I still keep Internet Explorer around though. Close to 70% of the visitors to my site use it, at least they do according to the statistics I was getting from SiteMeter until I had to remove their code to let Internet Explorer keep running properly. I also need it for some of the work I do in my straight job. At least I'll still get statistics from SiteMeter, but it's going to be a limited set for a while. Oh well.
SiteMeter is working on an upgrade to their service and it's going to handle the tracking code differently. Maybe it will work without injecting HTML into the document. I don't know about Statcounter, but I rarely use their statistics anymore anyway, so that's not going to be much of a loss. Still it's a shame to have to turn off some perfectly good utilities because Microsoft can't seem to fix bugs rather than explain them away.
[Update:David at third world county has something to say about this too. He's not quite as kind to Microsoft (I believe he calls the product Me$$ySoft Internet Exploder) as I am. Walls of the city blames the problem on SiteMeter. Even so, it's really Microsoft's bug!
Get a REAL browser. Use Firefox, Opera, or Safari!]
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