“Hey the user clearly doesn’t want this. But I’m a web developer in 2023 and the user is my enemy! How can we do something the user explicitly does not want us to do?”
I'm perfectly fine with a webserver having logs of HTTP requests I send to it. I'm just not okay with executing arbitrary third party code. This seems like a decent solution. And as a positive side effect it will actually record the group of people with very slow to load or no javascript that are almost always missed by JS only surveys. Maybe with more accurate representation of these numbers devs won't fall back on the old "everyone executes all javascript" fallacy and they'll start designing HTML documents again instead of javascript web applications.
Are you saying first-party analytics of any kind are evil? Users have the right to not use the site, which is the only way users are going to leave no traces.
I think you have the right to track the usage of your product. And if you are ad-supported and not a sole proprietorship, you have an obligation to your business to at least know whether your monetization strategy is failing due to your users' ad-blocking preferences. The "% who block ads" figure is vitally important in deciding, for instance, whether to offer an ad-free paid tier.
If someone is using ad blocking, especially with custom rules, they are saying, loud and clear, they DON'T WANT most JavaScript running.
web developers should just respect that and move on, not try everything the browser allows in order to ram it down their throats. Theres really no excuse for it. with browsers essentially acting as operating systems these days, you're basically trying to justify malware.
Agree, first-party tracking is a legitimate business interest. When you interact with a business, you should reasonably expect that they will gather some data, voluntary or not. Even basic stuff of "a user purchased a pair of socks and a birthday card", then they can use the info to improve the user experience, like put those products closer together or offer a bundle discount.
This is an unfair characterization. At least for how Codepen is using it. They aren't doing anything with this besides measuring how many people are using ad-blockers. (and if Codepen tried to block ad-block users with this technique I'm sure rules will be updated to subvert them quite quickly, causing them to lose these analytics)
Detecting when scripts fail to load is actually an excellent incentive to address script load failure, regardless of the nature of the script. Users who cannot reliably access your networked thing will be better served if you know that than if you don’t.
superkuh|2 years ago
xp84|2 years ago
I think you have the right to track the usage of your product. And if you are ad-supported and not a sole proprietorship, you have an obligation to your business to at least know whether your monetization strategy is failing due to your users' ad-blocking preferences. The "% who block ads" figure is vitally important in deciding, for instance, whether to offer an ad-free paid tier.
2h|2 years ago
If someone is using ad blocking, especially with custom rules, they are saying, loud and clear, they DON'T WANT most JavaScript running.
web developers should just respect that and move on, not try everything the browser allows in order to ram it down their throats. Theres really no excuse for it. with browsers essentially acting as operating systems these days, you're basically trying to justify malware.
XCSme|2 years ago
varenc|2 years ago
eyelidlessness|2 years ago