Working notes behind crawler — every query, its population and its denominator, the report script and its unedited output, the folds and their residue, the quotes that were checked, and what could not be established. Corpus-level caveats that apply to every page on this site are on corpus and are not restated here.

Recorded. Two populations, and the page never mixes them without saying so.

used and produced both count as driving a crawl: a paper that built its own crawler crawled with it. compared and mentioned do not — that is related work, and it is why the specialised-crawler table has a separate “papers only mentioning” column.

cd /workspace/artifacts/wiki
node scripts/report_crawler.mjs                       # every figure on the page
node scripts/report_crawler.mjs --wiki                # the same, as DokuWiki tables
node scripts/quote_check.mjs --tools 'openwpm|playwright' --show 20
node scripts/check_page_numbers.mjs \
  pages/programming_crawler.txt out/new/report_crawler.txt \
  '===== Use in Publications =====' '===== Recommendations ====='

check_page_numbers.mjs left four figures unaccounted on 2026-08-12. Three are permanent and legitimate and are named here so the next run does not re-investigate them: 100 (“not against 100%”), 19.1 (the crawled share of the corpus, from data/extract/OVERVIEW.md) and 106 (the quote-check total, from out/new/quote_check_crawler.txt, not from this report). A fourth, 53, is the old OpenWPM count quoted on the page as history. The guard also caught a real error: the page briefly carried 93 from an intermediate run of the quote check, corrected to 106 before saving. Run it whole-page too (§10).

Recorded. Old = 4,322-paper corpus (page as published 2026-08-06). New = 5,859-paper corpus.

Moved by more than a rounding step, and why it matters:

• Playwright, 10 → 34 papers (1.2% → 3.0%), and in the provisional 2025–2026 bucket it overtakes Puppeteer (9.6% against 8.1%). This is the one clear reordering the extended corpus produced. The old page's flat statement “Playwright's first appearance in this corpus is 2022” stays true; the sentence after it was rewritten.
• Tracker Radar Collector 8 → 21 and Foxhound 2 → 8 in the all-papers mention table. The old page's closing sentence for that table already warned that “the 2024 boundary cuts them off mid-growth”. It did, and by a factor of two to four. The sentence was rewritten to say so rather than to warn about it.
• “Names a library, not a browser” 23 → 49, growing about twice as fast as the corpus. The new strings are the reason: 2025–2026 papers write “a Playwright-controlled browser”, “Playwright-derived browser”, “Puppeteer/TRC desktop browser”.
• Bespoke, own name 98 → 184. Corpus growth plus the same effect the README already documents: including produced in the tool query surfaces one-off names.
• Artifact share 23.6% → 21.6% for 2010–2013. A genuine change in the same window, from the newly retrieved IEEE S&P papers landing in the early buckets.

Not changed: the page's prose about how each library works, the sandbox comparison, the WebDriver BiDi section, the recommendations, and every citation.

Reconstructed (design), recorded (this run's residue). An ordered list of regexes, specific tools before the generic libraries they wrap, so puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth lands in Anti-detection patches and not in Puppeteer. Unmatched strings are not discarded: they become the Bespoke crawler, given its own name row, because almost every one of them is one paper's own tool.

Fold accounting for the current corpus (printed by report_crawler.mjs, section “Fold accounting and the artifact trend”, added 2026-08-12 precisely because these three figures were on the page and not in the report):

1075 tool mentions across 501 distinct strings in the 1120 crawling papers.
Exact string "Selenium": 194 papers. Folded Selenium family: 242 papers
  (exact-string counting would undercount by 19.8%).
Bespoke: 147 generic + 184 own-name, 10 in both, union 321 of 1120 (28.7%).
Papers naming any of Puppeteer, Playwright, Chrome DevTools Protocol (direct),
  Scrapy, OpenWPM: 215.

The 204-string residue is printed in full at the end of out/new/report_crawler.txt. It is too long to reproduce here and it is genuinely one-name-per-paper; the interesting part is what is new in it, below.

Recorded. On the 4,322-paper corpus the browser fold left 1 unmapped string (Ghostery). On the 5,859-paper corpus it left 15, and every new one was mappable:

After the change the residue is back to 1 distinct string, Ghostery — which is an extension, not a browser, and is deliberately left unfolded so it stays visible.

That the residue grew from 1 to 15 without anything breaking is the general lesson: a fold silently ages against a growing corpus, and only a printed residue shows it. Interestingly, all five Chinese-browser strings came from one paper, which is why “Other named browser” stayed at 5 papers while five strings left the residue.

Recorded. The 2025–2026 slice introduced a cluster of one-off names that are not bespoke crawlers in the old sense but LLM-agent browser automation: Browser-Use / browser-use (two spellings, two papers), AgentLab, BrowserGym, MCP Server Crawler. A sixth paper, USENIX/2026/the-state-of-passkeys…, drives Playwright through Browser Use.

This was deliberately not folded into a family and not written up on the page. The refresh brief for this run is a mechanical re-derivation, and “does the field now drive browsers with LLM agents” is a new claim needing its own population, its own dating and its own reading of the papers — five or six papers in the thinnest, provisional years of the corpus is not enough to call it current practice. It is logged as a separate work item instead. Anyone picking it up should start from this residue list and from programming:crawler’s Being Detected section, since an agent-driven browser is a different detection surface.

A second, smaller cluster in the same residue: consent-automation tools used as instruments — autoconsent, DuckDuckGo autoconsent, Super Agent-Automatic Cookie Consent, ConsentChk. Those belong to consent rather than here.

Recorded, 2026-08-12. scripts/quote_check.mjs is new; before it, this page's spot-check was done by hand and left no artefact, which is why the old figure (“66 quotes, 44 exact”) cannot be reproduced.

$ node scripts/quote_check.mjs --tools 'openwpm|playwright' --show 20
106 quotes checked: 58 exact, 32 partial (>=60% of 5-word windows),
16 below threshold, 0 with no full text on disk.

All 16 below-threshold quotes were then read by hand against paper.cols.txt with whitespace normalised. All sixteen are present in the paper. None was unsupported. Two representative failures:

• PETS/2022/my-cookie-is-a-phoenix… — extraction has “All measurements are performed using the Open-WPM platform on the Firefox browser.”; the paper has “…using the Open-WPM platform [52] on the Firefox browser.” The extraction dropped the citation marker.
• CCS/2025/in-the-dom-we-trust… — extraction has “we created a Playwright-based crawler to collect snapshots of webpages”; the source reads “we created a Playwrightconstrains the valid child elements, and everything else is moved based [18] crawler to collect snap…”. The column repair spliced the adjacent column mid-word.

The lesson for anyone reusing evidence.quote: a failed exact match on .cols.txt is weak evidence of anything. Check the distinctive noun phrase, not the sentence.

Reconstructed. The content page's tool claims are sourced to primary material and were verified on 2026-08-06 by the original run. Not re-verified on 2026-08-12 — the refresh touched no external claim — so the “checked 2026-08-06” dates on the page are accurate and should be re-checked before anyone leans on them again.

• OpenWPM: repository README, docs/Configuration.md, scripts/install-firefox.sh, issues #557 and #503.
• PageGraph: pagegraph-crawl README and the brave-browser wiki's own limitations list.
• Tracker Radar Collector: repository README (concurrency cap, injected anti-detection script, autoconsent).
• PhantomJS: ariya/phantomjs#15344, the maintainer's own suspension notice.
• webXray: rejected the tool as installable. api.github.com/repos/timlib/webXray → 404, api.github.com/users/timlib/repos → empty, pypi.org/pypi/webxray/json → not found. The page cites the 2015 paper for the method and says plainly that the tool cannot be installed today. This is the clearest example on the site of an industry check changing what the page says.
• Foxhound: its README's “Cite us!” section, which asks for the EuroS&P paper — a venue this corpus does not cover, which is itself the reason the page warns that a tool's paper count here is a lower bound.

Rejected: SEO listicles of “best web scraping tools” were rejected wholesale by the original run; none is cited.

• Whether Playwright has actually overtaken Puppeteer. It has in the 2025–2026 bucket, and that bucket is provisional. Two complete venue-years would settle it; they do not exist yet.
• Whether the anti-detection cohort is 9 or 12 papers. The folded framework family (crawling population, used/produced) gives 9; the all-papers mention table gives 12 using and 2 more only mentioning. Both are on the page, in the two tables whose populations differ. They are not inconsistent, but a reader who reads only one table will get a different number, and there is no single right answer to publish.
• Why 40 crawling papers have no crawlConfig record. Same unresolved question as on crawling_location.
• The original run's spot-check. “66 quotes, 44 exact” cannot be reproduced; quote_check.mjs did not exist. Replaced rather than corrected.
• The sandbox measurements were not re-run. The Selenium/Puppeteer/Playwright/CDP comparison, the WebDriver BiDi responseCompleted finding and the “two network handlers cross-deliver” bug are from 2026-08-06 against selenium-webdriver 4.46. Library versions have moved since. Nothing in this refresh touched them, and nothing in this refresh verified them.

Recorded. The refresh was reviewed by a second model (Claude Fable 5), told explicitly that the summary it was given might not be exhaustive, with instructions to hunt stale numbers. It found a systematic defect, not a scatter of typos, and it is worth stating because it will recur on the next refresh:

• check_page_numbers.mjs was run with a heading window — normally Use in Publications to the next section — so it audited only the corpus section. Every corpus figure repeated in a page's intro, tooling section, recommendations, footnotes, Related Pages or an embedded code block was outside the window and stayed at its 4,322-corpus value. Across the six pages 29 such figures survived the first pass.
• The matcher was substring, not word-boundary, so report.includes('59') was satisfied by 11.59 bits. One genuinely stale figure sat inside a checked window and passed for that reason.

Both are fixed in scripts/check_page_numbers.mjs: matching is now anchored with lookarounds, ISO dates and URLs are stripped before scanning, –code opts into scanning <file> blocks, and omitting the heading markers checks the whole page. Run it windowed and whole-page. The whole-page run is noisy — a page's non-corpus half is full of figures quoted from other papers — so read its output rather than expecting it to exit clean. Fixed on this page's content page as a result: 11.6% → 12.0% (twice), Selenium 21.8% → 21.6%, Puppeteer 6.3% → 6.8%, direct CDP 35 papers (4.1%) → 42 (3.8%), headless 12.9% → 12.5%, and unnamed bespoke crawlers 34 → 75. Two prose corrections the numbers forced:

• The Playwright section still said “still rare in the literature — 10 papers”, two screens from a corpus table saying 34 and a sentence saying Playwright overtakes Puppeteer. Rewritten.
• “OpenWPM users are more than twice as good as average … Playwright's cohort is next best” ranked the two backwards against the table directly above it (Playwright 26.5%, OpenWPM 25.9%). On the old corpus Playwright led 50.0% to 25.5% on a base of ten papers; with 34 they are effectively tied, and the sentence now says so.
• The framework table had drifted out of descending order after the refresh moved three rows. Restored.

106 is a permanent legitimate unaccounted figure on this page: it is the quote-check total, from out/new/quote_check_crawler.txt, not from report_crawler.mjs. Recorded here so the next run does not re-investigate it. §3 above previously said “four … all deliberate” while listing one figure (93) that was a real error — corrected.

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