I think NoScript is an excellent Firefox plugin, that makes surfing both faster, and safer. Today I hit my first problem in many months of usage. A website using Google-Analytics "__utmlinker" for navigation.

"__utmlinker" is a method of passing cookie details for Google Analytics old Urchin tracking system from one domain to another. Since I don't trust Google-Analytics (in NoScript at least!) the function isn't available, and the link just didn't work for me. End of sale? In my case I cut and pasted the URL out of the JavaScript and carried on.

The "free" Google-Analytics seems to have dampened down the web analytics market somewhat. Is cross subsidizing your Analytics offering with money from your online advertising, and other services, evil?

In my to-do list is "check out nuconomy.com" who include a server side API in their analytics product. It isn't exactly a complicated API, but it makes so much sense for sites like 350.com at work, where navigation doesn't tie nicely with purchasing, and we want many ways of getting to the same Perl purchasing code, just to put the conversion tracking code on the server, rather than worry too much about how they got there (surely that is what the analytics should tell us - without doing all the hard work ourselves).

It strikes me that Google (Urchin) shouldn't have needed or encouraged folks to put in JavaScript linking, since if they have JavaScript running in source and destination, they can fairly easily figure out if it is the same browser instance. Or they could have done something that degrades more gracefully, but then perhaps they assumed folks would trust them!

Either way, if you are starting to use 3rd party JavaScript in place of HTML anchor tags, perhaps it is time to find a simpler way.