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Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
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…
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…
The privacy implications of third-party tracking is a well-studied problem. Recent research has shown that besides data aggregators and behavioral advertisers, online social networks also act as trackers via social widgets. Existing cookie…
This paper examines some of the potential challenges associated with enabling a seamless web experience on underpowered mobile devices such as Google Glass from the perspective of web content providers, device, and the network. We conducted…
Search engine results often misalign with users' goals due to opaque algorithms, leading to unhelpful or detrimental information consumption. To address this, we developed a Google Chrome plugin that provides "content labels" for webpages…
Traditionally, the efficiency and effectiveness of search systems have both been of great interest to the information retrieval community. However, an in-depth analysis of the interaction between the response latency and users' subjective…
The web has become a ubiquitous application development platform for mobile systems. Yet, web access on mobile devices remains an energy-hungry activity. Prior work in the field mainly focuses on the initial page loading stage, but fails to…
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics…
Mobile web browsing has recently surpassed desktop browsing both in term of popularity and traffic. Following its desktop counterpart, the mobile browsers ecosystem has been growing from few browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) to a…
Thanks to the wide range of features offered by web browsers, modern websites include various types of content such as JavaScript and CSS in order to create interactive user interfaces. Browser vendors also provided extensions to enhance…
Client-side Javascript execution environments (browsers) allow anonymous functions and event-based programming concepts such as callbacks. We investigate whether a mutate-and-test approach can be used to optimise web page load time in these…
More and more people use the Internet to work on duties of their daily work routine. To find the right information online, Web search engines are the tools of their choice. Apart from finding facts, people use Web search engines to also…
User quality of experience in the context of Web browsing is being researched widely, with plenty of developments occurring alongside technological advances, not seldom driven by big industry players. With the huge reach and infrastructure…
A Web browser utilizes a device's CPU to parse HTML, build a Document Object Model, a Cascading Style Sheets Object Model, and render trees, and parse, compile, and execute computationally-heavy JavaScript. A powerful CPU is required to…
Energy efficiency is an important criterion to judge the quality of mobile apps, but one third of our randomly sampled apps suffer from energy issues that can quickly drain battery power. To understand these issues, we conducted an…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
This paper is the first attempt at providing a holistic view of the Chrome Web Store (CWS). We leverage historical data provided by ChromeStats to study global trends in the CWS and security implications. We first highlight the extremely…
Over the past years, e-commerce platforms have expanded substantially, providing customers with convenient shopping experiences. To enhance e-commerce websites, it's essential to grasp user engagement and factors affecting conversion rates.…