Comments on: Better Google Analytics JavaScript that doesn’t block page downloading

By: Michelle

Michelle — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:12:05 +0000

Thank you so much for this! I’m not a programmer at all, but this was really easy to follow, my pages are loading faster and I’ve “checked status” a few times and everything seems to be running fine.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:21:39 +0000

Very useful, thanks for posting.

By: msg

msg — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:04:16 +0000

OK, looking again, I guess that it is just the vars declaration. Was confused by the mix of declarations and definition in the same statement.

By: msg

msg — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:29:33 +0000

I am confused, what is the “, pageTracker, s” part of the line that defines the var gaJsHost?

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:41:38 +0000

Using Safari “Web Inspector”, it becomes clear to see that this still blocks rendering.

Any suggestions on a work around?

By: Diego

Diego — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:49:25 +0000

Nice code, clean, and fast.
One note to all those people who are working on the operafix. Adding a random parameter to the ga.js file so it fixes the cache problem defeats the use of this script all together and it will add download time to all your pages.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 25 May 2009 04:42:42 +0000

Even using this script to load Google Analytics, I still occasionally have my web page HTML blocked in rendering while my Firefox 3.0 status bar says

“Transferring data from http://www.google-analytics.com...”

Any ideas?

By: sticks

sticks — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:42:59 +0000

Many thanks for the report and info — I’m away right now but will check this all out in a couple of days.

By: John Magnus

John Magnus — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:52:23 +0000

Nice idea, nice script and thanks for publishing it! As Bruno mentioned, it fails in Opera when the script is cached. The problem isn't present with the latest Opera 10 weeklies, though in the last few release versions (9.6++) it fails on "_gat". Had this exact problem when creating a Twitter widget a while back, at the time the daily snapshot of Google Chrome exhibited this problem as well (haven't re-tested). With my widget, the no-cache workaround solved the issues in both browsers. Here's a screenshot of Opera's error console, viewing this post with Opera 9.64 (the latest release). I've implemented what I hope is a workaround at my sandbox (js). I'm fairly new to Google Analytics and I'm no JavaScript wizard, so I have no idea if it actually solves the problem or introduces new issues (though no errors are reported!).

By: sticks

sticks — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:59:10 +0000

Thanks very much for letting me know! I've changed my example code to check for || ‘complete’ === s.readyState. I think somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I already knew this about IE, but sure didn't remember it when I was adapting the example code! With respect to Opera, I haven't been able to produce any problems (Opera 10 alpha, both with and without new Delayed Script Execution setting enabled). But then, I've been running/testing slightly different code (a couple of functions abstracted and the whole thing abstracted into a module). So, I've also modified my example code above to better match my abstracted version in case that eliminates the problem you're having. I wonder if you retest if you'll still have problems with Opera when ga.js is loaded from cache? If so, can you tell me what version of Opera you're testing so I can debug? You might also use the Opera Developer Tools console on this website ... you can check in the network tab to see that __utm.gif is loaded, and use the scripts tab / command line to check the value of lyncd.log, it's an array that'll include the string "GA executed" if the callback that initializes the GA pagetracker has been run. Thanks again for the bug report and solution!