Snowplow JavaScript Tracker 4.0.0 released

Announcements New releases
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We are excited to announce the fourth major version of the Snowplow JavaScript tracker! See the announcement on our blog.

The release adopts the fetch API for making requests to the Snowplow collector which provides the keepalive option that enables requests to outlive the webpage they were made from. Performance of the track calls has been improved by making cookie writes async. Our benchmarks show this improves the time it takes to track 100 events to a third of what it was in v3.The tracker APIs have been significantly improved and simplified:

  • Form and link click tracking now support event delegation and don’t require the app to refresh the tracking after page changes.
  • It’s now easier to manage global context using named tags.
  • Plugins add a new filter function to enable skipping events.
  • The tracker API on Node.JS has been significantly revised and streamlined also thanks to the use of the fetch API.

Other changes include the YouTube and HTML5 media plugins adopting new media schemas, upgrades to the UUID package, revised defaults, and removal and deprecation of older plugins.

Enhancements

  • Use fetch API instead of XMLHttpRequest both in browser and Node trackers and refactor emitter and event store interfaces (#1076)
  • Make cookie writes async by default to improve tracker performance (#1340)
  • Fix message when a resource triggers errors (#1341)
  • Add event delegation for form tracking (#1329)
  • Add support for named global context (#1331)
  • Add a filter function to plugins to filter out events so that they are not tracked (#1326)
  • Add event delegation for link click tracking (#1325)
  • Add browser-tracker-core default for os_timezone (#1338)
  • Revise Node.js initialization API
  • Migrate to v2 Media for HTML5 Plugin (#1344)
  • Migrate to v2 Media for YouTube plugin (#1342)
  • Support events on buttons/links/forms in ShadowDOMs (#1351)
  • Use capture-phase listeners for button click tracking (#1348)
  • Switch to GA4 as default for gaCookies plugin (#1349)
  • Disable b64 for SDJ data on POST requests from browsers by default (#1352)
  • Update discoverRootDomain default behaviour (#1350)

Removed deprecated functionality

  • Remove browser-features, optimizely, ecommerce and consent plugins, deprecate enhanced ecommerce and performance timing plugins and add web vitals by default (#1345)
  • Revise default plugins included on the JavaScript tracker (#1147)

Upgraded internals

  • Update uuid package dependency to version 10.0.0 (#1305)
  • Update browser targets for compilation (#1131, #1132)
  • Update Node.js to v14 (#1129, #1130)

Other improvements and fixes

  • Change default tracker initialization parameters for JS/Browser v4 (#1144)
  • Fix SelfDescribingJson type to allow optional keys in type parameter (#1330)
  • Fix newTracker optional typing (#1237)
  • Fix newTracker typing to accurately return null or undefined (#1167)
  • Read the request response to avoid overlapping requests to collector (#1358)

Upgrading

Please refer to the migration guide for instructions on upgrading and the breaking changes.

Version 4.0.0 is available as @snowplow/browser-tracker on npm , or as the tag based javascript tracker - available on GitHub Releases , jsDelivr or unpkg.

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