Console Clutter: A Cross-Browser Measurement of Console Messages

@inproceedings{helbrechtConsoleClutter2026,
  title = {{Console Clutter: A Cross-Browser Measurement of Console Messages}},
  shorttitle = {{Console Clutter}},
  booktitle = {{International Conference of Web Engineering}},
  author = {Helbrecht, Thomas and Rautenstrauch, Jannis},
  date = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {TBA},
  abstract = {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 information on the quantity and nature of messages developers encounter when opening the console, and whether these messages differ 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 the landing pages of 51,984 websites. In total, we collected 2,088,416 messages, averaging 13.39 messages per website, with a maximum of 10,143 messages on one website in Firefox. While developer-caused messages (e.g., console.log) appear similarly across browsers, browser-caused messages (e.g., Cookie warnings or Content Security Policy errors) are strikingly different in both content and amount. With our in-depth analysis, we discover how console messages can reveal common misconfigurations and implementation issues. Lastly, we open-source our measurement framework to enable further research into the browser console message ecosystem.},
  isbn = {TBA},
  langid = {english}
}