Author: Steve Souders Published: February 19, 2010 Source: stevesouders.com / High Performance Web Sites (Archived here because Lindsey led the Browserscope project Steve writes about.)
Article
Browserscope is an open source project that builds on Souders' earlier UA Profiler work. Its purpose is to help make browsers "faster, safer, and more consistent" by running categories of tests that measure browser behavior. The current test categories include:
- Network
- Acid3
- Selectors API
- Rich Text
- Security
The project is led by Lindsey Simon, who posted updates on the Browserscope security tests the same day. The security category was originally created by Collin Jackson (CMU) and Adam Barth (UC Berkeley). For this release, they collaborated with David Lin-Shung Huang and Mustafa Acer (both from CMU) to add tests covering:
- HTTP Origin Header
- Strict Transport Security
- Sandbox Attribute
- X-Frame-Options
- X-Content-Type-Options
Other updates accompanied the release. The list of "top" browsers was refreshed — notably, IE 6 was dropped. Lindsey added a dropdown menu to each test category to make navigation easier. Souders, who runs the Network category, split the overloaded parallel script loading test into four more specific tests measuring whether external scripts load in parallel with images, stylesheets, iframes, and other scripts. Brian Kuhn (Google) contributed a test measuring support for the SCRIPT ASYNC attribute.
All the data is crowdsourced.
That crowdsourcing is critical — it allows the project to operate without a dedicated test lab and to gather data under real-world conditions. Souders encourages readers to visit the Browserscope test page and click "Run All Tests"; it only takes a few minutes and runs automatically.
We're all in this together.
Selected comments
Michael Bolin asked whether IE6 could be restored to Browserscope.org, arguing it still held more market share than several tracked browsers and that web developers still needed to design for it.
Steve Souders replied that IE6 was still on the site "along with hundreds of other browsers." It had only been removed from the "Top Browsers" grouping to leave room for newer browsers. He suggested choosing "Major Versions" to view IE6 or using a querystring like:
http://www.browserscope.org/?category=security&v=1&ua=IE+6,IE+7,IE+8