Related papers: Browser Feature Usage on the Modern Web
In the early days of the web, giving the same web page to different browsers could provide very different results. As the rendering engine behind each browser would differ, some elements of a page could break or be positioned in the wrong…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
Content blocking is an important part of a performant, user-serving, privacy respecting web. Most content blockers build trust labels over URLs. While useful, this approach has well understood shortcomings. Attackers may avoid detection by…
The web is used daily by billions. Even so, users are not protected from many threats by default. This position paper builds on previous web privacy and security research and introduces JShelter, a webextension that fights to return the…
We studied the web permission API dialog box in popular mobile and desktop browsers, and found that it typically lacks measures to protect users from unwittingly granting web permission when clicking too fast. We developed a game that…
As web technologies evolve, web archivists work to keep up so that our digital history is preserved. Recent advances in web technologies have introduced client-side executed scripts that load data without a referential identifier or that…
The internet is a major distribution platform for web applications, but there are no effective transparency and audit mechanisms in place for the web. Due to the ephemeral nature of web applications, a client visiting a website has no…
Many Android applications embed webpages via WebView components and execute JavaScript code within Android. Hybrid applications leverage dedicated APIs to load a resource and render it in a WebView. Furthermore, Android objects can be…
Browser-use agents are widely used for everyday tasks. They enable automated interaction with web pages through structured DOM based interfaces or vision language models operating on page screenshots. However, web pages often change between…
Trackers have recently started to mix tracking and functional resources to circumvent privacy-enhancing content blocking tools. Such mixed web resources put content blockers in a bind: risk breaking legitimate functionality if they act and…
Language constructs inspired by functional programming have made their way into most mainstream programming languages. Many researchers and developers consider that these constructs lead to programs that are more concise, reusable, and…
HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 avoid concurrent connections but instead multiplex requests over a single connection. Besides enabling new features, this reduces overhead and enables fair bandwidth sharing. Redundant connections should hence be a story…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
Modern applications increasingly interact with web APIs -- reusable components, deployed and operated outside the application, and accessed over the network. Their existence, arguably, spurs application innovations, making it easy to…
Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of…
Over the last two decades, the scale and complexity of the Internet and its associated technologies built on the World Wide Web has grown exponentially with access to Internet as a facility occupying a prime place with other amenities of…
Web browsers are the most common tool to perform various activities over the internet. Along with normal mode, all modern browsers have private browsing mode. The name of the mode varies from browser to browser but the purpose of the…
Web applications, accessible via web browsers over the Internet, facilitate complex functionalities without local software installation. In the context of web applications, a workload refers to the number of user requests sent by users or…
The hidden nature and the limited accessibility of the Dark Web, combined with the lack of public datasets in this domain, make it difficult to study its inherent characteristics such as linguistic properties. Previous works on text…
Most popular web browsers include "reader modes" that improve the user experience by removing un-useful page elements. Reader modes reformat the page to hide elements that are not related to the page's main content. Such page elements…