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Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

browser-details.com

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Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#41

Post by analog »

ra wrote: post #4

I think it's a GREAT idea. Now, this might just be me, and I don't want to sound negative, or take anything away from the effort you've obviously put into making this really good, but ... For $120 / year I think, hmm I could probably build something that does this (just for me) in an hour, and it'd be fun! However at $10 per YEAR, I would think it's a steal and jump at it. Not suggesting you should drop your pants on…

Build, deploy, host and maintain for an hour per year? I think that might be a bit optimistic.

Certainly for an agency to do this will cost them more than an hour of developer time. $120 per year is a steal, OP should add different pricing brackets to capture more value from bigger agencies.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#42

Post by nodata »

mileszs wrote: post #40
nodata wrote: post #39

Unless your client's problem is "I can't log in", why not just look in your log to see which browser they are on?

It's actually a lot easier, unless you have next-to-zero traffic, to ask _them_ to take an action that puts the info in your inbox, rather than dig in logs, which could have that specific user's information buried amongst hundreds of other entries. It's a time-saver. What if you have insufficient logging (Heroku sans a decent logging plugin, for instance)? What if you built the thing, but it's hosted by a third-party…

If you can't quickly identify your client in your logs you will have bigger problems.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#44

Post by professorTuring »

mootothemax wrote: post #38
professorTuring wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can solve this problem by using a "wildcard certificate". It's like 300$ more expensive than a normal one. You can test how it works creating your own: http://www.justinsamuel.com/2006/03/11/howto-create-a-self-s...

You can solve this problem by using a "wildcard certificate". It's like 300$ more expensive than a normal one. Incorrect. You cannot create a wildcard domain for every domain in existence. That would somewhat undermine the whole point of SSL. Edit: I think I misunderstood slightly. You're correct if you mean using the same domain for clients (e.g. client1.domain.com, anotherclient.domain.com), but not if you want cli…

I misunderstood your original concern :S, I meant what you said in your edit.

I don't think there is a nice solution for the other problem =)

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#45

Post by davidw »

meaty wrote: post #36

We wrote our own version of this which took about 2 minutes to write. 1. Client hits /support/client-info which generates a specific system error with a unique ID (right 6 digits of a GUID) and pumps browser, error and user context information via log4net into our logging system. Client tells us the error ID. 2. Open monitoring system, type error ID in. It's all there. Not only that, we use it for error monitoring to…

Seems kind of awkward.

Thinking about it offhand using some Rails terminology, let's see.

* Naive version: save user information after every request via after_filter or some other hook. Probably slow for sites that get a lot of traffic.

* Slightly less naive version: check to see if current_user.browser_info has changed compared to the current request in an after_filter or other hook. If so, save it in the DB. This way you can not only check what they're using right now, but what they were doing yesterday when they did something that caused your site to go haywire.

* I'm sure the above can be improved on: it'd be nice to package it up as a gem. This is not rocket science.

Looking in the logs is easy enough, but it's data that should be very easily available to support people, and they probably should not have ssh access to the server...

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#46

Post by Jacqued »

dubcanada wrote: post #6

Google Chrome on a Mac reports the following... PDF: No - wrong Chrome has a built in PDF reader JAVA: No - wrong I do have java OGG-VIDEO: Probably supported - lol? probably H.264-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ WEBM-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ And not to be a party pooper but why do I need to signup? Why can't I just click "Get Browser Details" get a unique hyperlink that I could then send to someone. What if I hav…

Not on chrome but I get the wrong browser too I'm on IE 8 (yeah, big corp...) and the report states I am using IE 7.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#47

Post by mgkimsal »

analog wrote: post #41
ra wrote: post #4

I think it's a GREAT idea. Now, this might just be me, and I don't want to sound negative, or take anything away from the effort you've obviously put into making this really good, but ... For $120 / year I think, hmm I could probably build something that does this (just for me) in an hour, and it'd be fun! However at $10 per YEAR, I would think it's a steal and jump at it. Not suggesting you should drop your pants on…

Build, deploy, host and maintain for an hour per year? I think that might be a bit optimistic. Certainly for an agency to do this will cost them more than an hour of developer time. $120 per year is a steal, OP should add different pricing brackets to capture more value from bigger agencies.

what sort of "agency" are you talking about? a web development agency?

I 100% agree this would take more than an hour to develop with a nice UI, and there's some ongoing maintenance, but it's still pretty low numbers. And there's still arguments for a DIY approach - for instance, Aa DIY approach means you can improve/iterate/integrate at your own pace.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#48

Post by mikerastiello »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #3

I have found this to be useful: http://supportdetails.com/ What benefit does your service have over this one? Furthermore, if I send mycompany.browser-details.com links to two people, how does your system identify who clicked on the link?

My company used this as a model when we built our own solution. I think between our designer and developer we had it designed and built out in 2 or 3 days. Ours also supports file uploads.

Once the email is submitted it goes right into our support queue.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#49

Post by MattBearman »

taf2 wrote: post #21

The problem this doesn't solve is the customer who emails support, includes a screenshot. The screenshot doesn't include the browser frame, but just clearly shows something being rendered incorrectly. You kind of are stuck - first trying to reproduce locally, and then you have to resort to asking "what browser are you on?"... Anyone have other ideas about how to handle the email support when it's like this?

Hate to thread-jack, but that's exactly the use case I built BugMuncher (http://bugmuncher.com) for :)

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#50

Post by abrowne »

dubcanada wrote: post #6

Google Chrome on a Mac reports the following... PDF: No - wrong Chrome has a built in PDF reader JAVA: No - wrong I do have java OGG-VIDEO: Probably supported - lol? probably H.264-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ WEBM-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ And not to be a party pooper but why do I need to signup? Why can't I just click "Get Browser Details" get a unique hyperlink that I could then send to someone. What if I hav…

Similarly, it reports no PDF plugin for my Firefox 20 on OS X, but pdf.js works great to view PDFs.
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