fireflare

Drives Firefox Nightly to run the @cloudflare/speedtest library (loaded from esm.sh via a local HTML page), records throughput, latency, jitter, plus per-measurement points, and saves structured JSON results. A separate report.py renders the JSON files as a self-contained HTML report (summary table + boxplots).

Report

A rendered comparison report is checked in at results/report.html: five connection paths side by side, direct HTTP/1.1, direct HTTP/3, and Firefox's in-browser IP-protection (VPN) proxy reached three ways (HTTP/2 CONNECT, HTTP/3 CONNECT, and HTTP/3 MASQUE connect-udp), with throughput, latency, and jitter per path. Generate the data with uv run main.py --matrix, then render with uv run report.py.

Status

• Direct baseline works (uv run main.py).
• HTTP/3 variant works (uv run main.py --h3, points the library at bastion.h3.speed.cloudflare.com).
• In-browser VPN (IP protection) works (uv run main.py --vpn), routing speedtest traffic through Firefox's IP protection / Fastly proxy. Two layers matter and the report surfaces both: the transport to the proxy (HTTP/2 CONNECT, or HTTP/3 with --custom-firefox), and how the origin is reached through it (classic CONNECT, or MASQUE connect-udp). With --custom-firefox and Alt-Svc priming, end-to-end MASQUE works: the origin connection itself is HTTP/3 (connect-udp) through the proxy.

Requirements

• Linux x86_64
• uv
• Python 3.11+

Firefox Nightly and geckodriver are downloaded on first run into .cache/.

One-time setup for --vpn

The VPN runs need a Firefox profile that's already signed in and has the feature flipped on. Do this once:

env LD_LIBRARY_PATH='' ./.cache/firefox/firefox -profile ./profile

Then in that Firefox window:

1. Go to about:config, set browser.ipProtection.enabled = true.
2. Sign in to a Firefox Account.
3. Quit Firefox cleanly (releasing the profile lock).

The persistent profile lives at ./profile/ (gitignored) and is reused across runs. --vpn runs toggle the proxy on; runs without --vpn turn it off.

Run

uv run main.py                # direct baseline (HTTP/1.1)
uv run main.py --h3           # direct HTTP/3 (bastion.h3.speed.cloudflare.com)
uv run main.py --vpn          # route through IP protection (HTTP/2 CONNECT proxy hop)
uv run main.py --vpn --h3 --custom-firefox   # end-to-end HTTP/3 over MASQUE (try build)
uv run main.py --matrix       # all five comparison paths, one result JSON each
uv run main.py --matrix --profile   # also capture a Firefox Profiler "Networking" profile per run
uv run main.py --debug        # tiny measurement set; for plumbing changes

Output JSON files land in results/, named <tag>-<utc-timestamp>.json. The tag records, in order: debug (only with --debug); on --vpn runs proxy-<v> for the transport to the proxy (h3 = QUIC with connect-udp negotiated to the proxy, h2 = TCP CONNECT); and origin-<v> for the HTTP version negotiated with the origin, which reflects the destination tunnel method (h2 = CONNECT, h3 = connect-udp end to end).

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT)

at your option.