6. The Session Player
The session player is where a recording comes to life. You're not watching a screen capture — you're replaying a faithful reconstruction of exactly what the visitor saw and did, with an event timeline, a console, and per-visitor context layered on top. This chapter walks through every control and panel that actually exists in the player, so you can move from "play the session" to "jump straight to the moment something went wrong."
A note on permissions. Some player features are gated by your role — for example, Dev Tools, commenting, pinning, and the Heatmaps tab each require the matching permission. If you don't see a control described here, your role may not include it. See [Chapter 16 — Team & Account Management].
6.1 Player Controls
The playback controls sit beneath the replay. They behave much like a video player, with a few session-specific extras.
Core controls
Play / Pause
Start or stop playback. The spacebar also toggles play/pause.
Rewind 10 seconds
Jump back 10 seconds.
Forward 10 seconds
Jump ahead 10 seconds.
Speed
Cycle playback speed — 0.5×, 1×, 2×, 4×, 8× (shown as "X2", "X4", etc.).
Skip Inactivity
Automatically fast-forward over idle stretches.
Fullscreen
Expand the player to fill the screen.
Current time / total time
Where you are in the session, and its total length.
Skip inactivity
Real sessions have dead air — a visitor reads, switches tabs, or steps away. With Skip Inactivity enabled, the player jumps over periods with no recorded activity, so you only watch the parts where something is actually happening. This often turns a long, mostly-idle session into a couple of minutes of real activity.
Speed
Use higher speeds to triage quickly: 2× for a general watch-through, 4×–8× to skim a long session for a specific moment, and back to 1× (or 0.5×) when you've found the moment and want to study it closely.
Dev Tools & AI Summary
Two toggles open extra layers over the player:
Dev Tools — opens the Console panel (section 6.4).
AI Summary — generates a plain-language summary of the session (section 6.9).
Keyboard shortcuts
The player's keyboard shortcut is spacebar to play/pause. (Other navigation — skipping, seeking, changing speed — is done with the on-screen controls.)
6.2 The Timeline
Below the replay runs the timeline — a seek bar that doubles as a map of everything that happened during the session. Instead of scrubbing blindly, you can see where the interesting moments are and jump straight to them.
Seeking
Drag the playhead to move to any point in the session.
Click anywhere on the timeline to jump to that moment.
A progress fill shows how far through the session you are.
Color-coded event markers
The timeline renders markers for events at their position in time, color-coded so patterns stand out:
Yellow
Click events
Orange
Page visits / navigation
Green
DOM changes (page mutations)
Pink
Frustration (rage clicks)
Inactivity & comments on the timeline
Gray blocks mark inactive periods — the idle stretches that Skip Inactivity (section 6.1) jumps over.
Avatar circles mark comments left by you or teammates. Click one to open the comment at that exact moment (section 6.7).
Tip — the pink frustration markers are the fastest visual cue on the timeline. When you open a high-frustration session, look for the pink clusters and click straight to them.
6.3 Session Events Panel & Event Types
The Session Events panel (in the right sidebar) lists everything that happened during the session, in order. It's the player's index: filter it, search it, and click any entry to jump the replay to that exact instant.
Event types
Each event has an icon and label:
Click event
A click/tap interaction
Visited page
The visitor loaded or moved to a URL
Inactive period
An idle stretch with no activity
Comment
A comment left on the session
Rage click event
Rapid, repeated clicking (frustration)
Dead click event
A click that produced no response
Thrashing event
Erratic cursor "thrashing"
Error click event
A click associated with an error
Custom event
An event you sent with FUS.event(...) ([Chapter 7])
Error log event
A logged error
Uncaught exception event
An uncaught JavaScript exception
Unhandled rejection event
An unhandled promise rejection
Response error event
A failed network response
Jump to any event
Click an event to seek the replay to that moment and pause there — no scrubbing required. This is the core debugging move: find the error event, click it, then watch the seconds leading up to it.
Filtering & searching events
Busy sessions can have hundreds of events. Filter the panel to a specific type — show only errors to debug, only custom events to trace a flow, or only page visits to follow the journey — and use the search box to find a specific event.
Errors and network failures live here
FullSession does not have a separate "Errors" tab or a network-waterfall panel. Instead, the relevant events surface directly in this list:
Error log, uncaught exception, and unhandled rejection events capture JavaScript errors.
Response error events capture failed network responses.
To investigate a problem, filter the events panel to these types, click the event to jump to it, and watch what the visitor did right before. For logged console output and stack traces, open the Console (section 6.4).
Per-event insights & locked events
Some events offer an insights action (a chart icon) that opens a details view with analytics for that event across sessions.
Events your role can't access appear locked — a small lock icon indicates the feature requires a higher permission or plan.
6.4 Console / Dev Tools Panel
Clicking Dev Tools opens the Console panel — the browser console output captured from the real visitor's browser, synced to the replay.
The button is labeled Dev Tools, but it opens the Console. There is no separate Network or Resources tab in the player — network failures appear as Response error events in the Session Events panel (section 6.3).
What it captures
The console reconstructs the messages logged during the session — log, warning, and error output — at the moment each was printed.
Using the console
Filter by level — switch between All, Log, Warn, and Error.
Search — type in the Filter box to find a specific message.
Jump to moment — each message has a link that seeks the replay to the instant it was logged, so you can correlate what the user saw with what the code was doing.
Expand stack traces — error messages with a stack trace can be expanded to show the file, function, and line/column, so an engineer can trace the error to its source.
Workflow — open Dev Tools, filter to Error, find the failing message, expand its stack trace, then click jump to moment to see exactly what the visitor did to trigger it.
6.5 Page Navigation
A session usually spans several pages. The player's page navigation lets you step through them without scrubbing.
The page stepper
In the player header, a counter shows which page you're on out of the total — for example url: 2/5 (or a view: indicator for mobile app sessions). The full URL or path is shown, with the complete value on hover.
Previous / Next page arrows jump the replay to the start of the adjacent page.
Each page knows its time visited and total time on page, so you can see how long the visitor spent on each step.
Session statistics
The player also surfaces page-level engagement for the session, including Average Time on Page and Total Active Time on Pages — a quick read on how engaged the visit was overall. (For aggregate page statistics across all visitors, see [Chapter 10 — Insights & Cards].)
Tip — the page stepper is the fastest way to skip to "the part where they reached checkout" — step forward to the checkout page rather than scrubbing the whole session.
6.6 Visitor Info & Sentiment
The right sidebar shows who you're watching and the context of their visit.
What's shown
Avatar
A generated symbol so each visitor is visually distinct
Identity
Email if identified, otherwise the user ID
Country
The visitor's country
IP address
The visitor's IP
Session start time
When the session began (e.g. June 14, 2026, 2:30 PM)
Referrer
Where the visitor came from (shown at the top of the sidebar)
No map. Location is shown as a country name (and IP), not as a point on a map.
Sentiment indicator
The panel shows a quick sentiment read — a happy or unhappy face — based on how much frustration the visitor experienced (error clicks, dead clicks, and rage clicks). A handful of frustration signals tips it to "unhappy," giving you an at-a-glance sense of how the visit went before you even press play.
First session & integrations
A First Record link (when you're not already on the visitor's first session) jumps to that visitor's earliest recorded session — useful for understanding how a returning user first arrived.
If the Intercom integration is configured and the visitor has an email, a link opens their Intercom profile, connecting the replay to your support conversations.
6.7 Comments, Tags, Flagging & Sharing
The player is a collaborative workspace. Several actions let you capture findings and hand sessions to teammates. (Most are available in your private workspace and may depend on your permissions.)
Comments
Leave comments anchored to a moment in the session. Use Add comment while a session is paused, and the current timestamp is captured automatically. Comments appear as avatars on the timeline (section 6.2); click one to read it, and comments can be edited or deleted by their author. This turns a recording into a small discussion thread — perfect for flagging a bug at the exact second it happens.
Tags
Attach color-coded tags to a session to organize it — for example UX Design, Bug, Rage, or a custom tag of your own. Tags are searchable from the Sessions list, so "every session tagged Bug" is one query away ([Chapter 5 — Sessions]).
Pin / Flag
Pin a session from the header to add it to your Flagged list (and the session playlist), so your team has a shared shortlist of sessions worth revisiting ([Chapter 5, section 5.5]).
Share
Use Share in the header to open a Copy Session Link dialog and send the recording to a teammate. See [Chapter 5, section 5.6] for how share links behave (they open the session from the start and are accessible to anyone with the link).
6.8 Watching Across a Visitor's Sessions
A single recording is one visit; the player also helps you see the whole relationship with a visitor.
Autoplay & recent sessions
The sidebar includes an Autoplay toggle and a Recent Sessions selector. With autoplay on, FullSession plays through sessions in sequence — handy for reviewing several visits (or several sessions in a segment or funnel) without returning to the list between each.
A visitor's full history
Because sessions can be linked to an identified visitor ([Chapter 4 — Identifying Users]), you can move from one session to that visitor's other sessions — including their first recorded session — to understand their journey over time rather than in a single snapshot.
6.9 AI Summary
For a fast read on what happened in a session, toggle AI Summary. FullSession generates a plain-language, written summary of the session and displays it as an overlay over the player (with a brief loading state while it's produced).
The summary is a quick orientation — "what happened in this visit?" — before (or instead of) watching the whole thing end to end. It's especially useful when triaging a long session or deciding whether a recording is worth a full watch.
The big picture — the player gives you precise playback controls (including ±10s and 0.5–8× speed), a color-coded timeline, a filterable Session Events panel where errors and network failures surface as events, a synced Console behind the Dev Tools toggle, a page stepper, rich visitor context with a sentiment read, full comment / tag / flag / share collaboration, autoplay across a visitor's sessions, and an AI Summary for a quick recap. There is no separate network or errors panel and no geolocation map — those signals live in the events list and the visitor panel respectively.
Next up: [Chapter 7 — Recording Rules & Element Tracking] moves from watching sessions to configuring what gets captured — controlling which pages record, defining the custom events that appear in this player's events panel, and tracking the elements you care about.
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