Co-browse Restrictions and Known Limitations

Due to some browsers' strict cookie policies, Genesys highly recommends that you host the Load Balancer on the same domain as the website or on one of its sub-domains. Otherwise, chat and Co-browse stickiness cookies may be rejected as third-party and the solution will not work. Users will not be able to start chat nor begin co-browsing.

Synchronization of Interactions with Browser Plugins is Not Supported

By design, synchronization of interactions with browser plugins is not supported. HTML markup managed by browser plugins (Flash, Java, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc.) is synchronized as is and may be displayed if both browsers support the plugin.

Some Obsolete Web Techniques are Not Supported

Quirks Mode, Almost Standards Mode — Co-browse always uses Full Standards Mode when rendering the customer's website on the agent side and requires the valid document type definition to be set on the customer's pages. Technically, it means that doctype is always set to <!DOCTYPE html> when rendering anything on the agent side. Pages in Quirks Mode or Almost Standards Mode are not supported.
Framesets — Obsolete technology is not supported.

Some HTML5 Features are Not Supported

The following HTML5 features are not supported:

Canvas
WebGL
HTML5 audio and video—HTML markup is synchronized. Synchronization of playing, pausing, etc. is not supported.

SVG

Genesys Co-browse 8.5.1 adds support for SVG in co-browse sessions.

Some Pseudo CSS Selectors are Not Supported

The following pseudo selectors are not supported:

:visited
:target
:active
:focus
:fullscreen
:scope
CSS3 form selectors such as :valid and :required

For other pseudo selectors (For example, :dir(), :read-only, and :nth-last-of-type()), synchronization depends on the browsers. The pseudo-selector will be synchronized only if it is supported by both browsers.

Important

The :hover selector is supported. For more information, see JavaScript Configuration API—css.

Customer Representative Can Handle Only One Co-browse Session at a Time

Starting with Co-browse 8.5.003, an agent is by default limited to handling one co-browse session at a time. You can allow an agent to handle more than one co-browse session at a time by configuring co-browse session limitations in Workspace Desktop Edition.

Conferencing, Consultation and Transfer are Not Supported for Co-browse Sessions

As Co-browse sessions are not interactions like chat or voice, these standard operations for interactions are not currently supported for Co-browse.

Mouse synchronization

Mouse positions may differ slightly on the customer and agent-side if websites render differently in different browsers.

Representation of Dynamically Shown List Items May be Partially Broken on Agent Browsers Using IE10 or IE11

Issues may arise when IE10/11 is used as a agent browser on a website with dynamically shown/hidden sub-menus.

Example:

Workaround

Create a CSS file with a rule that sets the fixed display property of submenu list items.
Example:
```
.my-submenu li {
  display: block !important;
}
```
Host this file somwhere that is accessible via HTTP
Specify the URL of the file in the slave.cssPatchUrl option in Config Server.

IE Conditional Comments

IE Conditional comments are used to create CSS targeting specific versions of IE or any version of IE. This technique works on IE versions 9 and below. We recommend that you avoid IE conditional comments. This technique is deprecated and support has been dropped by Microsoft since IE10.

Example:

<!--[if IE]>
<link href="ie.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]> -->
<link href="non-ie.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<!-- <![endif]-->

If your website is using this technique, we strongly advise that the agent's machine uses IE10 or above for the Co-browse agent side. In this case, CSS synchronization issues are possible if the site visitor (customer user) uses IE9.

Co-browse Fails Silently on Internet Explorer 8

Co-browse will always fail silently when run on Internet Explorer 8, meaning that the error message Your browser is not supported will not generate.

DOM Restrictions

DOM Restrictions do not support images.

Static resources behind authentication are not supported

In the current architecture, agents receive static resources (such as CSS or images) either directly from the co-browsed website or through the Co-browse Server acting as a proxy (see CSS Synchronization). If such a resource is available only for authorized users, the agent or Co-browse Server will not be able to fetch it, and it will not be displayed to the agent. This may result in an image not shown to the agent, or in the co-browsing being almost dysfunctional, depending on how heavily your website relies on authentication for static content.

Support for such content will be addressed in a future release.

Configuring Co-browse for multibyte character encodings

In rare cases, when the co-browsed web page uses multibyte encoding like Shift JIS and some other factors combined, Co-browse may not work in Internet Explorer on certain versions of Windows. To mitigate this, configure your Load Balancer to serve the Co-browse JavaScript file (the gcb.min.js) in UTF-8. For Nginx, this can be done by adding the charset UTF-8; line to any http, server, or location directive. For example, your Nginx config (see Configuring a Load Balancer for Co-browse Cluster) may look like this:

   ...
   location /cobrowse {
     charset UTF-8;
     ...

Scaling effects are not supported

If an end-user or an agent are scaling their browser, the scaling effect will not be transferred to the other side, however, the size of shared page area remains the same for both sides.

Different co-browse sessions in the same browser instance are not supported for the user

Co-browse does not support two different sessions in the same browser instance at the same time for the user.