Browser session benchmarker

A developer tool to benchmark realistic browser sessions for Chromium-based browsers in order to extract privacy-related stats.

This has been created in order to obtain objective numbers for measuring the impact of browser extensions known as blockers. The original motivation was issue #151 of HTTP Switchboard.

This developer tool is rather bare. I keep the output results as simple as can be because I plan to use these numbers for end users. Streams of statistical numbers would not be useful to the end-user.

If you want to improve, just fork, or ask for a pull request.

Usage

Open your browser developer tools. Click the Browser benchmark tab.

On the right there is a text area where you will enter directives. Valid directives are:

• clear cache: empty the browser cache.
• clear cookie: remove all cookies.
• wait n: wait n seconds after a page has completely loaded before fetching stats. Default to 1 second.
• repeat n: repeat the benchmark n times, return averaged results. Default to 1.
• URL: a URL which will be benchmarked. Must start with http:// or https://.

The results are displayed on the left when the benchmark complete:

• Bandwidth: the aggregate of the bandwidth used by all URLs in the list.
• Network hits: the aggregate number of network hits as a result loading the the URLs in the browser.
• Cache hits: the aggregate number of cache hits as a result of loading the URLs in the browser.
• Hosts: the aggregate number of hosts.
• Scripts: the aggregate number of scripts.
• Outbound cookies: the aggregate number of cookies.

Some stats above are also split in 1st and 3rd party figures:

• 1st-party: a hostname for which the domain is the same as the domain of the URL of the page. Example: blarg.foo.com is 1st party to www.foo.com.
• 3rd-party: a hostname for which the domain is different than the domain of the URL of the page. Example: blarg.bar.com is 3rd party to www.foo.com.

When the whole benchmark is repeated more than once, all the above values will be the average of the aggregated measurements.

Example

repeat 5
clear cache
clear cookies
http://news.yahoo.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://www.cnn.com/
http://news.google.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/
http://www.nbcnews.com/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
http://www.usatoday.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.wsj.com/
http://www.abcnews.go.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.latimes.com/

And here are typical results.