Related papers: UA-Radar: Exploring the Impact of User Agents on t…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
The increasing reliance on the internet has led to the proliferation of a diverse set of web-browsers and operating systems (OSs) capable of browsing the web. User agent strings (UASs) are a component of web browsing that are transmitted…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless tracking technique that attempts to combine information exposed by multiple different web APIs to create a unique identifier for tracking users across the web. Over the last decade, trackers have abused…
Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another…
HTTP client hints are a set of standardized HTTP request headers designed to modernize and potentially replace the traditional user agent string. While the user agent string exposes a wide range of information about the client's browser and…
Smartphones are now ubiquitous, yet our understanding of user interface factors that maximize mobile user experience (UX), is still limited. This work presents a controlled experiment, which investigated factors that affect the usability…
The rapid adoption of AI coding agents and AI assistant web services is fundamentally changing how developers discover, consume, and interact with technical documentation. This paper studies that transformation across three interconnected…
Usability testing is a fundamental yet challenging (e.g., inflexible to iterate the study design flaws and hard to recruit study participants) research method for user experience (UX) researchers to evaluate a web design. Recent advances in…
The proliferation of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents in web browsing scenarios present complex unintended consequences (UCs). This paper characterizes three UCs from three perspectives: phenomena,…
In a world where traditional notions of privacy are increasingly challenged by the myriad companies that collect and analyze our data, it is important that decision-making entities are held accountable for unfair treatments arising from…
The random surfer model is a frequently used model for simulating user navigation behavior on the Web. Various algorithms, such as PageRank, are based on the assumption that the model represents a good approximation of users browsing a…
The diversification of information access systems, from RAG to autonomous agents, creates a critical need for comparative user studies. However, the technical overhead to deploy and manage these distinct systems is a major barrier. We…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Usability testing is a fundamental research method that user experience (UX) researchers use to evaluate and iterate their new designs. But what about evaluating and iterating the usability testing study design itself? Recent advances in…
Automated web testing plays a critical role in ensuring high-quality user experiences and delivering business value. Traditional approaches primarily focus on code coverage and load testing, but often fall short of capturing complex user…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…
Autonomous multimodal language models are rapidly evolving into web agents that can browse, click, and purchase items on behalf of users, posing a threat to display advertising designed for human eyes. Yet little is known about how these…
AI browsing agents are an emerging class of AI-powered bots capable of autonomously navigating websites. Unlike traditional web bots, AI browsing agents typically operate using real browsers and perform everyday tasks, making them difficult…
The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in instruction-following and context-understanding lead to the era of agents with numerous applications. Among these, task planning agents have become especially prominent in…
Modern browsers give access to several attributes that can be collected to form a browser fingerprint. Although browser fingerprints have primarily been studied as a web tracking tool, they can contribute to improve the current state of web…