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Dave and the team discuss SpaceX’s civilian mission, Facebook getting angrier, Amazon’s cameras penalizing drivers for risky driver that’s not happening, and more.
Georgia in Atlanta, Georgia listens on AM920 The Answer and asked: “I work remotely in a job that requires checking to see that our clients ads are visible in a staging site I access through a browser. For some reason, over the last couple weeks, these ads are no longer visible to me in any browser. I can’t see them. First Firefox stopped working, then Chrome. Opera worked once then stopped. Safari can’t even find a neighborhood Starbucks, so I’d never try that. I’d like to know why a browser would stop allowing me to see ads in a staging site and more important, what other browsers do you recommend I try? I know there are dozens of them. I’m using a Mac Mini desktop and my OS is 10.12.6. I’m hoping you can help me. I need this for my job.”
Georgia, from your description of how different browsers all stopped showing the ads, it sounds like one of two things may be at play:
1) A change in the staging sites javascript files.
Browsers cache javascript files, so you may see one fail before others do if there are changes as their cache policies run out and each browser refreshes the pages assets.
The browsers console will typically report errors loading javascript files, so you can check there.
2) There could be some blocking either by a browser level ad-blocker (which is not likely in this case given how many browsers youre using), a network level ad-blocker, a VPN with a built in ad-blocker, or even a DNS-level ad-blocker.
The easiest way to know if its a network issue is to connect to a phones hotspot, clear your cache, and then try to reload the staging site again.
In terms of which other browser you should use, frankly none, and you should rethink your stance on Safari. Safari is currently the number 2 desktop browser in the market by usage with a market share of just under 20%. Chrome and Chromium browsers lead by a mile with 59% of the market, Firefox is at 6% and the rest barely even rank.
If youre testing to make sure that visitors can see ads, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are the most important browsers, everything else is a margin of error. Theres not much point to reporting that ads can be seen by the 0.003% of users that visit using an obscure browser.
Heres some free unethical advice for you: If you pay a programmer (ideally a QA engineer) they can set you up with a custom headless Selenium script that can do these checks for you in the background using Chromedriver (to test using Chrome) and Gekodriver (to test using Firefox) and report the results while you sit back and watch Netflix.
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