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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running

Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an alternative (network effect).

While an alternative does really need to be free and easy to implement, it also needs to address the above two hurdles, which is a tough ask.

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GA is also widely supported by other tools marketers know, understand, and use daily. Its appeal is definitely not limited to developers - would-be alternatives might stand to benefit by considering other users.

GA also has support from many third party libraries because of the popularity that you can just plug-in and get started with.

e.g.

https://github.com/react-ga/react-ga

https://github.com/angulartics/angulartics2

https://github.com/MatteoGabriele/vue-gtag

Isn't GA itself a third-party JavaScript library that you can just plug-in and get started with?

Why do you need framework specific libraries on top of that?

You don't need framework libraries. The point is, for many frameworks installing GA is just adding one file to your dependencies and entering your UA number. Installing a comparable tool that doesn't have a library involves marginally more friction.

To handle single page sites or more specific actions

Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com

If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.

Many people are quite surprised to know that Photoshop has actual competition, even when they don’t really want to pay for the actual thing. It’s often easier to just pay for it than try an alternative which may or many not be right for their needs.

While GA is free Photoshop has one of the most insanely bloated pricing approaches for casual usage - the fact it's handed out like candy to students (and various institutions allow this instead of familiarizing students with alternatives) is the only reason its kept such a dominant market position.

If your boss asks you for some analytics about site usage the first thing searching the web will turn up is GA and you can have it set up on a test env in less than half an hour including acquiring an API key and reading enough docs to configure it.

I use Photoshop alternatives because they're cheaper than maintaining a perpetual license/subscription, but Photoshop is the big gorilla because it is the best photo editing app in the industry today. Bar none. And that's what lets them get away with their pricing structure.

Nobody would pay for Photoshop if it didn't provide value.

I am (1) a current Photoshop CC subscriber and (2) an owner of the second-to-last version of Photoshop that was available under a perpetual license, and I disagree that Photoshop is the best photo editing app in the industry today.

For photo retouching, I prefer Affinity Photo. One thing I especially appreciate about it is how efficient it is at handling large, 16-bit-per-channel images with many layers.

Photoshop is useful to have around mainly because it makes it somewhat easier to work with certain kinds of PSD files that I get from other people.

I also have Photoshop CC and Affinity Photo, and while I use AP for the simple stuff, it can't hold a candle to the more advanced stuff you can do in Photoshop that is still on the (long-term) plan for AP.

In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)

The concern over xss is important. But the data you send to google opens your users up to a different type of risk.

As someone who runs one of those 3rd-party analytics: the JS you add to your site is small, readable, and can be downloaded and included from your own CDN. Hell, you don't even need the script, you can just write your own (not very hard actually). I took a look at Plausible a while ago, and I think the same applies here as well.

With GA, I can do none of that; it's just a massive unreadable blob I can only load from the GA servers. I just have to trust Google doesn't do anything I don't want (including XSS, but also other issues). It's not even easy to figure out what information exactly it collects last time. It's very untransparent and un-auditable and the website equivalent of loading binary kernel blobs.

> rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com

How true is this? There's popularity, and there's significance in the face of Photoshop's market hold. I'd love to believe there's some significant dent being made in Adobe's market share here, but I doubt it.

This is the first time I've heard of photopea, thanks for sharing that!

Free + because it's so popular, when you have a problem, there are a million resources to find answers. Not even Adobe Analytics can match that.

My mate worked at Yahoo, and they used Yahoo Analytics, and he said it was great, but that when you ran into any issues at all, good luck working out what to do!

The reality of an analytics product is that a non-techy marketing person needs to be able to solve their own issues without wasting tech time (which is the only reason why TagManager exists), and that's a REALLY hard problem to solve.

So Google Analytics is largely popular because it's a recognizable brand, and not really because it's actually a easy-to-use and useful product, and you're going to claim the same for Google Docs, and for Google Buzz and GChat and GPlus and Google Wave?

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