automatically detect browser specific issues from usage statistics

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.