How would you pass data from one browser to another?

Question

This is a bit of a tricky one so would appreciate any input on the matter.

Imagine the following scenario:

User visits my website in Internet Explorer and due to lack of HTML5 support, I ask them to download and install Chrome. As they would now have a brand new browser and visit the website directly, I would lose all affiliate tracking they had in place originally.

I would like to save the affiliate Id but can't think how to get this information from one browser to another. I obviously need to confirm it's the same user on the new browser to make sure the affiliate tracking is still valid.

Flash Shared Objects unfortunately work in all browsers excluding Chrome, as Chrome has it's own directory for Flash and doesn't use the standard one.

For a server side solution I would need to generate some kind of unique fingerprint/hash but I can't think of anything that would be 'unique' enough to be able to confirm it's the same user on the second visit in the different browser.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks

Yes, but how do you generate a unique id so you know it's the same user? — digitalclubb, May 30 '13 at 10:16
Yeah, that's my biggest issue. This all happens before login and I can't ask them to login. A tricky situation! — digitalclubb, May 30 '13 at 10:21
keep two profiles for them in the first instance, and then merge them when they do log in. — Spudley, May 30 '13 at 15:36
save the data on server, associate the data with a generated ID (on server side), write a cookie to save the same generated ID (on client side). Use the ID from cookie to match with the ID on server. — Khanh TO, Jun 11 '13 at 13:15

How would you pass data from one browser to another?

0 Answers0