A survey on 10,000 of the “top websites on the Internet” (according to Alexa) done by Pingdom reveals that a whopping 40% of the Google Analytics users still use the old tracking code, known as urchin.js. This script still works, but it might not in the near future.
“The information we are getting from Google is that urchin.js will be decommissioned sometime this summer,” says Julien Coquet from LBi, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.
When we asked Julien what will happen once urchin.js is decommissioned, his guess was that it will eventually start returning a 404 error (file not found) and therefore stop registering traffic.
There’s really no reason to use the old urchin.js script, the new one (known as ga.js if I’m not mistaken) is faster and has more features. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you really should check what version you’re using, and update the code if it is pointing to a file called urchin.js.
