Artifacts for "Console Clutter: A Cross-Browser Measurement of Console Messages"

Anybody who opened the browser developer tools on a random website was likely shocked by the wall of warnings and errors while the visited website appeared to function correctly. Although the developer tools and the contained console tab have existed in modern browsers for more than ten years and are regularly used by web developers and power users, there is limited study on the quantity and nature of messages users encounter when opening the console, and if the available information differs between browsers. We close this research gap by performing the first systematic analysis of the browser console message ecosystem across the three main browser engines (Blink, Gecko, WebKit) on more than 50,000 websites. In total, we collected 2,088,416 messages, averaging 13.39 messages per website and browser, maxing out with 10,143 messages on one website in Firefox. While developer-caused messages (e.g., console.log) appear similarly across the browsers, browser-caused messages (e.g., Cookie or header warnings) are strikingly different in both content and amount, with Firefox being most verbose. Additionally, we show how console messages can reveal common misconfigurations and issues web developers face. Lastly, we open-source our framework to enable further research into the browser console message ecosystem. This repository contains the artifacts, which are part of the paper, including data collection pipeline implementation and analysis code.