We don't advertise, track or otherwise annoy our users, but if (like us) you use Brave, there's one thing you may need to know to get the best from our charts.

The Brave Browser #

Many of us use theBrave browser, as it's more private than Chrome on which it's built, and particularly because it blocks many adverts which otherwise get in the way of the web.

Public View obviously doesn't advertise, so Brave won't do much here, but the default Brave "shields up" setting does cause one minor annoyance with our charts. Our charts use Chart.js - open source industry standard charting software - and that needs to know a bit about your screen in order to draw "hover text" boxes on the charts correctly. Brave's "Agressively block fingerprinting" prevents chart.js working out how big it needs to draw hover text boxes. We don't use "fingerprinting" ourselves, but if you want your chart hover text boxes to look pretty, then turning this setting down for Public View, to just "Block fingerprinting", will allow chart.js to work perfectly.

Other Privacy Things #

Whilst we're here, our Privacy Policy summarises what we do and don't do with your browsing data. In summary, we're very well behaved, entirely legal, and very secure. If you're curious...

• The single "tracker" blocked by Brave in the image above is our Microsoft Insights tracker, which provides anomymized data to our support people. You're not made to wait for the tracker (it's asynchronous), but blocking it doesn't cause any problems.
• We use the service worker thread to keep your browser up to date with new metrics. The idea is that we want the data to be ready for you before you ask for it. Having a separate thread like this means we can get the data in the background, without anyone having to wait for it.
• If you allow it, we use "notifications" to quietly tell the service worker when there's new data available, so it can fetch it for you in advance.
• We use IndexedDB to store metrics, so you can flip between them quickly, and don't need to get anything twice over.
• The application is heavily cached, so in general, the more you use it, the faster it'll go. There's nothing "private" stored in the cache or anywhere else in the browser: it's all public data.
• We use Microsoft Insights in the browser to track user problems. So if you hit a problem in your browser, which our servers may not notice, the browser tells us about that, so we know things aren't right. The data may well allow us to work out what went wrong. On a good day that means we can fix problems before anyone reports them.