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Users browsing the web daily struggle to quickly locate relevant information in cluttered pages, complete unfamiliar multi-step tasks, and stay focused amid distracting content. State-of-the-art AI assistants (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)…
Since the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 more than 60 % of popular websites in Europe display cookie consent notices to their visitors. This has quickly led to users becoming fatigued with privacy…
Continuous experimentation (CE) is used by many companies with internet-facing products to improve their software based on user data. Some companies deliberately adopt an experiment-driven approach to software development while some…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
Improving software performance through configuration parameter tuning is a common activity during software maintenance. Beyond traditional performance metrics like latency, mobile app developers are interested in reducing app energy usage.…
Context: The usability software quality attribute aims to improve system user performance. In a previous study, we found evidence of the impact of a set of usability characteristics from the viewpoint of users in terms of efficiency,…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
Undeniably, the advent of mobile applications has brought new frontiers to usability engineering. To date, ongoing research has shown significant efforts to adopt and adapt usability principles to the mobile computing environment. One of…
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…
Mobile devices that connect to the Internet via cellular networks are rapidly becoming the primary medium for accessing Web content. Cellular service providers (CSPs) commonly deploy Web proxies and other middleboxes for security,…
Web browsers, particularly Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, have grown in popularity over the past decade, with browser extensions becoming an integral part of their ecosystem. These extensions can customize and enhance the…
Gamification represents an effective way to incentivize user behavior across a number of computing applications. However, despite the fact that physical activity is essential for a healthy lifestyle, surprisingly little is known about how…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Sharing our goals with others and setting public challenges for ourselves is a topic that has been the center of many discussions. This study examines reading challenges, how participation in them has changed throughout the years, and how…
With the increase in an average user's dependence on their mobile devices, the reliance on collecting his browsing history from mobile browsers has also increased. This browsing history is highly utilized in the advertising industry for…
Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…
The growing energy demands of HPC systems have made energy efficiency a critical concern for system developers and operators. However, HPC users are generally less aware of how these energy concerns influence the design, deployment, and…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
In 2023, images on the web make up 41% of transmitted data, significantly impacting the performance of web apps. Fortunately, image formats like WEBP and AVIF could offer advanced compression and faster page loading, but may face…
Network latency in mobile software has a large impact on user experience, with potentially severe economic consequences. Prefetching and caching have been shown effective in reducing the latencies in browser-based systems. However, those…