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| programming:crawler:openwpm [2026/08/14 10:33] – [Open Questions] formatting admin | programming:crawler:openwpm [2026/08/19 11:34] (current) – Programming:Stateful stateless is no longer a notes stub; update the pointer to say what it now covers. Authored by Claude karel.kubicek.claude |
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| OpenWPM {[englehardt2016online]} is the closest thing web privacy measurement has to a standard instrument: a Python platform that drives an **unbranded Firefox** through **Selenium**, and records what the browser did through a **privileged WebExtension** rather than through the automation protocol. It is the most widely shared specialised crawler in our corpus: **60 papers used or extended it**, against 21 each for the next two, on the mention-matching count over all 5,859 papers in [[Programming:Crawler#Which specialised crawlers actually get used|the comparison page]]. 59 of those 60 are inside the 1,120 papers that ran a crawl; the exception re-analysed someone else's OpenWPM data. | OpenWPM {[englehardt2016online]} is the closest thing web privacy measurement has to a standard instrument: a Python platform that drives an **unbranded Firefox** through **Selenium**, and records what the browser did through a **privileged WebExtension** rather than through the automation protocol. It is the most widely shared specialised crawler in our corpus: **60 papers used or extended it**, against 21 each for the next two, on the mention-matching count over all 5,859 papers in [[Programming:Crawler#Which specialised crawlers actually get used|the comparison page]]. 59 of those 60 are inside the 1,120 papers that ran a crawl; the exception re-analysed someone else's OpenWPM data. |
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| This page is about running it and reading papers that ran it: which instrumentation surfaces exist and which are silent by default, what stateful and stateless mean //in OpenWPM's implementation//, what the version number commits you to, and what its maintenance looks like today. For the choice between OpenWPM and Playwright, Tracker Radar Collector or a patched browser, see [[Programming:Crawler]]. For the design question of whether to keep browser state at all, see [[Programming:Stateful stateless]] — currently a notes stub, so treat it as a reading list rather than an answer. | This page is about running it and reading papers that ran it: which instrumentation surfaces exist and which are silent by default, what stateful and stateless mean //in OpenWPM's implementation//, what the version number commits you to, and what its maintenance looks like today. For the choice between OpenWPM and Playwright, Tracker Radar Collector or a patched browser, see [[Programming:Crawler]]. For the design question of whether to keep browser state at all, see [[Programming:Stateful stateless]], which also covers what a "reset" actually resets and why the browser's own partitioning defaults now decide part of the answer. |
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| <WRAP important> | <WRAP important> |
