Troubleshooting: Changes Aren’t Appearing on a Specific Browser in VWO – VWO

close this to read article

Problem Statement

I have set up a campaign, but its live preview looks different on different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. On specific browsers, the changes do not appear at all.

Resolution Steps

If the CSS selector path of the modified element is not the same on all browsers

For VWO to locate the modified element, its CSS selector path should be the same across all browsers. To ensure this, use the code editor to add a custom JS or CSS code for implementing the change to this specific element:

If changes are made using JS, but the browser does not support some specific JS function

If, say, you use the function.name property in JS, and it works on all browsers except Internet Explorer (IE). Find a corresponding JS function on the web that applies the same change on IE and then add it through the code editor, using a user agent check.

You may need to consult your development team for applying this code check. If it still doesn’t work, contact VWO support for assistance.

NOTE: Such issues are often encountered with IE due to the way it applies the changes. For example, if you have a duplicate CSS selector ID (by definition, the ID should be unique), changes would either be partially applied or not applied at all in IE because it will ignore the attempt to access the duplicate CSS selector ID. Browsers such as Firefox and Chrome grab the first ID and continue applying the change on the same page.

If changes do not appear because of the VWO code timing out

In case of a time-out, a visitor will only see the control version, and the visit is not tracked in the campaign. Increasing the time-out values in the VWO tracking code (Async code) may help.

To increase the time-out values, change the values of settings_tolerance and library_tolerance parameters of the VWO code, as shown in the following screenshot:

By default, the time-out values for the two parameters are 2000 and 2500 milliseconds, respectively. You can double the time-out values to 4000 and 5000 milliseconds to counter issues like slow Internet connections or incompatible IE browsers.

If your browser (IE) does not allow setting up a cookie for two-letter domains

If you need to set up a campaign to run on http://www.ab.xz, it will not work on IE; because it does not allow any cookie to be set for such domains. As VWO also uses cookies for tracking, the campaign will not work on IE.

For this issue, place the following code snippet before the VWO tracking code on your webpage. This step explicitly sets up the domain for the VWO code. Thereafter, the campaigns will work on IE as well.

<script>
   var _vis_opt_domain = "www.ab.xz";
</script>

Additionally, you can use the window._vis_opt_domain=document.domain to set up the domain instead of manually entering it.

The default configurations of Firefox and Safari browsers prevent VWO's SmartCode from running in incognito mode. Consequently, if the SmartCode is unable to execute, the campaign settings won't be retrieved, and any modifications won't take effect. Nevertheless, you can overcome these default settings by employing the following method:

1. For tracking on the Safari browser, go to Preferences > Privacy and disable the Prevent cross-site tracking setting.

2. For tracking on the Firefox browser, go to Preferences > Privacy & Security > Custom and disable the following settings- Cookies and Tracking Content.