new Browserscope security tests
Browserscope is an open source project based on my earlier UA Profiler project. The goal is to help make browsers faster, safer, and more consistent. This is accomplished by having categories of tests that measure how browsers behave in different areas. Browserscope currently has these test categories: Network, Acid3, Selectors API, Rich Text, and Security.
The project is led by Lindsey Simon. Today he blogged about updates to the Browserscope security tests. The security test category was created by Collin Jackson (CMU) and Adam Barth (UC Berkeley). They worked with David Lin-Shung Huang and Mustafa Acer (both from CMU) on today’s release of tests for HTTP Origin Header, Strict Transport Security, Sandbox Attribute, X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options. Check out their blog post for more details on what these tests actually do.
There are other new features in today’s release. We’ve updated the list of “top” browsers (notice we dropped IE 6). Lindsey added a dropdown menu to each test category for easier navigation. I run the Network test category. In that area I broke the overloaded parallel script loading test into four more specific tests that measure whether external scripts load in parallel with images, stylesheets, iframes, and other scripts. Brian Kuhn (Google) contributed a test for measuring whether the SCRIPT ASYNC attribute is supported.
One of the key aspects of Browserscope is that all the data is crowdsourced. This is critical. It allows the project to run without requiring a dedicated test lab. And the data is gathered under real world conditions. But to be successful, we need people in the web community to participate. When you’re done reading this post, point your browser to the Browserscope test page and click “Run All Tests”. It’ll only take a few minutes and you can sit back while it walks through all the tests automatically. We’re all in this together. Join us in making the web experience faster, safer, and more consistent.
Amichai Lesser | 02-Mar-10 at 3:01 am | Permalink |
Steve,
I am reposting to our APM linked in group and will ask people to participate.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2200667&trk=anet_ug_grppro
Thanks for all the great work.
Amichai
Michael Bolin | 02-Apr-10 at 10:31 am | Permalink |
Could you please bring back IE6 on Browserscope.org? It still has more marketshare than many of the other browsers being tracked, so even though it isn’t a great browser, we web developers still have to design for it, so knowing its limitations is important.
Steve Souders | 02-Apr-10 at 10:43 am | Permalink |
@Michael: IE6 is there, along with hundreds of other browsers. We just removed it from the “Top Browsers” group to make space for newer browsers. You can choose “Major Versions” to see IE6. You can also use a querystring, like this: http://www.browserscope.org/?category=security&v=1&ua=IE+6,IE+7,IE+8