Opera did some interesting research into JavaScript used on the web. As someone who writes a fair amount of JavaScript and reads through countless lines of other people’s scripts, I found this to be pretty interesting.
Overall none of the results were very surprising, though a few things did catch my eye:
- Omniture/SiteCatalyst Analytics ranks pretty high in the results. This to me suggests that the index of pages skews towards enterprise and large sites since Omniture is rather expensive service.
- Google Analytics made the list to nobody’s suprise. I am however surprised not to see Quantcast which seems to be pretty popular now.
- The popularity of
window.openreally hurts. Opening in a new window is so counter to how things are supposed to work. The user should decide on their own if they want to pop a new window (or tab). Most sites do this hoping the user forgets about the previous window and it improves their “average time on site” metric. VBScriptusage is slightly disturbing. Thankfully (in my experience) it’s most often found on older sites.
I wouldn’t mind knowing the popularity of scripts like SWFObject and Lightbox, assorted clones and PNGFix.
An analysis of graphics on the web could be interesting. GIF, JPEG, PNG. Then an analysis of the palette for GIF, JPEG compression, alpha transparency, interlacing, average file size and average amount per page.