I'll give you an example. I have a couple of customers that operate strict white lists when it comes to web browsing. You can only visit URLs if they are on the approved list. One of those companies has just 6 URLs on the approved list, and Google is not one of them. They have pretty much taken the stance that the Internet at work is a tool, and not to be used or something else. But every now and then I get asked to investigate why they can't get to certain web sites. The last one from memory was www.courierpost.co.nz, which they were using for couriers. It turned out Courier Post has built their site so that if Google Analytics is not available the pages wont load (well actually, there is about a 2 minute timeout, and then they load). I sent a message to the CourierPost people saying how to modify their website to prevent the problem, but no response. They had simply embedded the Google Anayltics code in a poor place, which prevented the browser from rendering the page even though it was fully loaded. So yes, Google Analytics can definately affect the use experience - in this case *paying* customers. ________________________________________ From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] on behalf of Nathan Ward [nznog(a)daork.net] ... Does the google analytics loading in the background thing really impact user experience? There was some code running on Wikipedia that also loaded things from several different hostnames, except it was intentionally broken and some would never load. This was 1 in every 100 page views for many many months. How many people noticed? I don't know of anyone that complained. Google were doing similar things on the search home page. I bet you didn't notice..