  Empirical technology and society research is in a methodological crisis.
Problems increasingly involve closed platforms, targeted content, and
context-specific behavior. Prevailing research methods, such as surveys, tasks,
and web crawls, pose design and ecological validity limitations.
  Deploying studies in participant browsers and devices is a promising
direction. These vantage points can observe individualized experiences and
implement UI interventions in real settings.
  We survey scholarship that uses these methods, annotating 284 sampled papers.
Our analysis demonstrates their potential, but also recurring implementation
barriers and shortcomings.
  We then present Rally and sdkName, a platform and toolkit for browser-based
research. These systems lower implementation barriers and advance the science
of measuring online behavior.
  Finally, we evaluate Rally and sdkName against our design goals. We report
results from a one-month pilot study on news engagement, analyzing 4,466,200
webpage visits from 1,817 participants. We also present observations from
interviews with researchers using these systems.
