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Queantic vs Simple Analytics

What actually runs in the browser when you add analytics — measured, side by side.

Many website owners add analytics scripts without fully understanding what actually runs in the browser. To highlight the difference, let's compare two analytics approaches: Queantic — a minimalist tracking pixel — and Simple Analytics, a popular lightweight analytics script.

Queantic: 96 Bytes of Tracking

Queantic uses a remarkably simple technique to track pageviews and user visits — just a single image tag with an onerror attribute. Here is the entire snippet you add to your site: 

<img onerror=src='//qntc.it/t/586c45fa?'+location src>

Here’s what happens when a browser encounters this tag:

  1. The browser tries to load the image, but the src attribute is left empty on purpose, causing it to fail instantly. This failure isn't a mistake — it's a trick to activate the next line of logic while keeping the code extremely short.
  2. The onerror handler runs as a result. It dynamically sets a new src that points to our tracking endpoint, appending location — which is JavaScript shorthand for the current page’s full URL. This captures where the hit came from without any extra setup.
  3. The updated src triggers a second image load — this time successfully — and silently sends your visit data to the tracking server. The closing src at the end finalizes the tag structure and ensures it's valid HTML. No scripts, no bloat — just 96 bytes of precision.

This approach results in an extremely lightweight tracking footprint — under 100 bytes — without any additional JavaScript or complex logic.

Simple Analytics: What’s Really in latest.js

On the surface, Simple Analytics appears simple. You add a single script tag to your HTML, like so: 

< src="https://scripts.simpleanalyticscdn.com/latest.js"></script>

But beneath this innocuous line lies a full-fledged analytics engine consisting of over 200 lines of JavaScript, executing every time a visitor loads your page. Here’s a unminified snapshot of what Simple Analytics’s script does: 

long script example

As you scroll through this seemingly endless chunk of code, ask yourself: is all this really necessary? From event tracking and scroll depth detection to engagement timers, visibility listeners, and SPA routing logic — this script is doing a lot more than simply recording a pageview.

All of it runs on every page load, in every user’s browser, just to send basic analytics data. For a service that claims to be simple and privacy-friendly, that's a surprising amount of bloat.

Queantic offers the same insights—without the baggage. Take a look at our demo.