Network: a console that says what a browser cannot measure

What it is, and who it is for

Network is a console of browser instruments on one page: a probe for any domain or address (DNS, reachability, your public address, the registration record), an “is it you or the internet?” sweep that times HTTPS round trips to sites on six continents, a short-link maker, a password bench with seven recipes, a domain lab, and a live wire of the Hacker News front page.

It is for anyone troubleshooting a connection or needing a strong password or a short link.

How it works

Everything runs in your browser (app.js lines 1–15). The probe asks Google’s DNS-over-HTTPS service, times an HTTPS HEAD request, reads your public address from api.ipify.org and its reverse name from dns.google, and fetches the registration record from rdap.org (lines 198–237). The sweep resolves each site and times a request to it from your own connection — 75 sites grouped by continent, or 50 drawn from a pool of 87 — and rates each continent (lines 488–508). The only server endpoints are the site’s own short-link store, which checks that a code is free before saving and lengthens codes only when the short ones are taken (lines 606–630).

Its signature is candour about the medium. The code’s header calls honesty the whole point: a browser cannot send ICMP, trace a route or read another site’s response, so the console measures what it can and says where it cannot — down to labelling its one drawn network-path panel a sketch. The password bench draws from crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling, so each character is chosen uniformly, never from Math.random (lines 29–38), and nothing it makes leaves the page. A probe or a sweep can be exported as a PDF.

• What it reads
• dns.google (DNS-over-HTTPS), api.ipify.org, rdap.org and hn.algolia.com — all from your browser
• The target sites themselves, timed from your connection
• labs.llc’s own short-link store: labluxa/check.php and save.php

What we measured, and when

The page came back from the local copy at 20:17:04 UTC at 126,883 bytes. We asked the short-link store whether the code “zq7x” was free — a read-only check — and it answered {"available":true} in 18 bytes; we saved nothing. Counting the lists in the code: the continental sweep holds 75 sites (25 North America, 10 Europe, 13 Asia, 11 South America, 6 Africa, 10 Oceania) and the random pool 87, of which 50 are drawn per run. The sweep runs only in a browser, so we did not run it.

The capture caught what our command line could not. At 20:14:53 UTC the page’s own self-test ran in the capture browser and printed its results on the first screen — callouts 3 and 4. The phone capture, five seconds later, shows a different reading, openai.com resolving in 49 ms, which is what a live test ought to do.

390 × 84420:14:58Z

12

Beside Globalping and Bitwarden Password Generator

Each comparator was checked on the date shown. We say what each does better before we say where Network goes further.

Where it falls short

• “Global” means sites hosted around the world, not measurements taken from around the world: every timing is from your own browser.
• A no-cors HEAD request succeeds on any HTTP answer, so a site serving an error page still counts as reachable, and the time includes a fresh connection’s DNS and TLS set-up.
• A labelling slip: the PDF report calls the continental sweep “~85 sites”; the list holds 75.
• Short links need the labs.llc server, and cannot be edited or given analytics.

The verdict