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Web browsers have been used widely by users to conduct various online activities, such as information seeking or online shopping. To improve user experience and extend the functionality of browsers, practitioners provide mechanisms to allow…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
Clearly, no one likes webpages with poor quality of experience (QoE). Being perceived as slow or fast is a key element in the overall perceived QoE of web applications. While extensive effort has been put into optimizing web applications…
With mobiles overtaking desktops as the primary vehicle of Internet consumption, mobile web performance has become a crucial factor for websites as it directly impacts their revenue. In principle, improving web performance entails squeezing…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
User expectations impact the evaluation of new interactive systems. Increased expectations may enhance the perceived effectiveness of interfaces in user studies, similar to a placebo effect observed in medical studies. To showcase the…
The speed at which code changes are integrated into the software codebase, also referred to as code review velocity, is a prevalent industry metric for improved throughput and developer satisfaction. While prior studies have explored…
The use of the internet, and in particular web browsing, offers many potential advantages for educational institutions as students have access to a wide range of information previously not available. However, there are potential negative…
Recommender systems are expected to be assistants that help human users find relevant information automatically without explicit queries. As recommender systems evolve, increasingly sophisticated learning techniques are applied and have…
The success of a web application is closely linked to its performance, which positively impacts user satisfaction and contributes to energy-saving efforts. Among the various optimization techniques, one specific subject focuses on improving…
Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
Quality of Experience (QoE) for various types of websites has gained significant attention in recent years. In order to design and evaluate websites, a metric that can estimate a user's experienced quality robustly for diverse content is…
Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they…
Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…
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…
Leveraging the perceptual phenomenon of crossmoal correspondence has been shown to facilitate peoples information processing and improves sensorimotor performance. However for goal-oriented interactive tasks, the question of how to enhance…
Communication is defined as "Who says what to whom with what effect". A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich…
Tor, one of the most popular censorship circumvention systems, faces regular blocking attempts by censors. Thus, to facilitate access, it relies on "pluggable transports" (PTs) that disguise Tor's traffic and make it hard for the adversary…