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Suppose you have a website that sells dog food (why not?) to people using a variety of browsers.

Is there some way to automatically be notified if sales (or some other activity) suddenly stops for a specific browser/version?

I'm sure it's technically possible to do, but I can't find any tools for it.

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  • I would have thought that you can only really determine the browsers that do complete the "sale (or some other activity)" - from your access logs or analytics. Compare this list against a list of known browsers (that have perhaps previously visited your site) to determine the browsers that are not in the initial list of doers. (?)
    – MrWhite
    Aug 26, 2015 at 7:51

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One thing that I have done is implemented logging of client side JavaScript errors to the server. See: Logging Clientside JavaScript Errors on Server

This involves:

  1. Putting in a JavaScript function to catch all error events
  2. Firing off an AJAX call to the server in that function
  3. Creating a server side script to capture that output and log it
  4. Creating a report of that data to figure out what the common problems are

It does a decent job of detecting errors that happen frequently in browsers that may not be otherwise well tested. I've found the limits of it are:

  • If you have ads or other 3rd party JavaScript, you may get errors that are unrelated to your own code
  • It doesn't detect problems that do not trigger a JavaScript error. This will include infinite loops, early termination, and non-JavaScript problems.
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  • Hey thanks. Currently I'm tracking javascript errors in Google analytics ( davidwalsh.name/track-errors-google-analytics ) which is similar. It might also be possible to set up GA to send me alerts when a particular browser gets too many exceptions, or when the conversion rate of a particular browser tanks. I'm wondering if there's any established non-homebrew way to do all this. Aug 27, 2015 at 3:22

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