Good! We need to ditch all the analytics software that rely on clients to make pointless HTTP requests. They are offloading their work on to the website visitors, wasting every user's bandwidth and slowing down internet connections worldwide.
If you want to know who is visiting your site, try reading your server logs.
Server logs are missing important information like screen resolution, navigator.language etc. Server logs also can't report on element events. Nor does it work with things like single page apps. How can developers make their apps better without having the proper analytics to do so?
We're dropping all third party domains at Userify [1] (plug: SSH key management software for EC2), but for reasons of both security and privacy.
What would happen to your website (or millions of websites) if one of the CDN's that you rely on started quietly issuing evil code to a few, targeted users? Would you notice? Would your users?
I don't think that it'd be too hard for us to add a simple API call that pokes data about screen resolution, browser agent string, language, etc upon load or login, and it'll be far more efficient and private than us sending random data off to GA or similar where they frequently don't even provide us IP addresses of our own site visitors so that we can correlate the data against our own logs.
The data that GA gathers is highly valuable... to Google. They only provide you visibility of the tippy tip of the iceberg.. but ultimately it's your customers' and your data, not theirs.
Don't compromise your users with third-party includes, even Google Fonts (which is still our last holdout on the website.. hm, someone should make a simple web app that gathers names and styles of fonts and provides a zip w/ pre-generated CSS.)
CDN's sound great but they're a huge privacy hole. Ask yourself; what's the profit model? Are they really just an opportunity to gather valuable data on other people's websites and browsing habits? (yes).
Please don't leak your customers' data.
Same here. I never really used third party domain software. I used Google Fonts for a while, but I find it pathetic to have some font files and some CSS loaded from a different server than mine. Google Fonts (and every CDN) can be a lot slower than my own server. Sometimes, the site hangs while "waiting for google.com". Silly.
Also, Google Fonts might be Google Analytics in disguise. Who knows.
I use Piwik for tracking, but the self-hosted version. I don't even use newsletter services. I bought a cheap newsletter plugin for Wordpress which I use as an autoresponder email course.
But delivery is all that matters they say. And yet, all Mailchimp and Aweber and whatnot goes 100% to my spam folder automatically. I believe the delivery argument is a myth.
The best part: Decision making is much easier. "So, your product can't be installed on my own server? Bad luck, I won't become your customer."
You can have the fonts and not have any requests leave your site by using something like this[1]. It downloads the Google font data so you can serve the font files and CSS from your own site.