Work towards shipping performance.measureMemory. This API intends to provide memory measurements for web pages without leaking information. It will replace the non-standard performance.memory and provide more accurate information, but will require the website to be cross-origin isolated. Try it out with the Origin Trial here! Deliverables for this quarter:
Work towards web perf support for Single Page Apps (SPAs). SPAs have long been mistreated by our web performance APIs, which mostly focus on the initial page load for ‘multi-page apps’. It will be a long process to resolve all measurement gaps, but we intend to start making progress on better performance measurements for SPAs by using a data-driven approach. Deliverables for this quarter:
Work towards web perf support for page abandonment. Currently, our APIs are blind to a class of users that decide to leave the website very early on, before the performance measurement framework of the website is set into place. This quarter, we plan to create and socialize a proposal about measuring early page abandonment.
Ship the full Event Timing API. Currently, Chrome ships only ‘first-input’ to enable users to measure their First Input Delay. We intend to ship support for ‘event’ so that developers can track all slow events. Each entry will include a ‘target’ attribute to know which was the EventTarget. We’ll support a durationThreshold parameter in the observer to tweak the duration of events being observed. Finally, we’ll also have performance.eventCounts to enable computing estimated percentiles based on the data received.
Ship a Page Visibility observer. Right now, the Page Visibility API allows registering an event listener for future changes in visibility, but any visibility states prior to that are missed. The solution to this is having an observer which enables ‘buffered’ entries, so a full history of the visibility states of the page is available. An alternative considered was having a boolean flag in the PerformanceEntry stating that the page was backgrounded before the entry was created, but there was overwhelming support for the observer instead.
Provide support for two Facebook-driven APIs: isInputPending and JavaScript Self-Profiling. The isInputPending API enables developers to query whether the browser has received but not yet processed certain kinds of user inputs. This way, work can be scheduled on longer tasks while still enabling the task to stopped when higher priority work arises. The JS Self-Profiling API enables developers to collect JS profiles from real users, given a sampling rate and capacity. It enables measuring the performance impact of specific JS functions and finding hotspots in JS code.
Ship the sources attribute for the LayoutInstability API. The Layout Instability API provides excellent information about content shifting on a website. This API is already shipped in Chrome. However, it’s often hard to figure out which content is shifting. This new attribute will inform developers about the shifting elements and their locations within the viewport.
LargestContentfulPaint: gather data about LCP without excluding DOM nodes that were removed. The Largest Contentful Paint API exposes the largest image or text that is painted in the page. Currently, content removed from the website is also removed as a candidate for LCP. However, this negatively affects some websites, for instance those with certain types of image carousels. This quarter, we’ll gather data internally to determine whether we should start including removed DOM content. The API itself will not change for now.
(Stretch) Work on exposing the ‘final’ LargestContentfulPaint candidate. Currently LCP just emits a new entry whenever a new candidate is found. This means that a developer has no way to know when LCP is ‘done’, which can happen early on if there is some relevant user input in the page. We could consider surfacing an entry to indicate that LCP computations are finished and including the final LCP value, when possible. There’s also an idea to include some heuristics to get a higher quality signal regarding whether the LCP obtained seems ‘valid’. If we have time this quarter, we’d be happy to do some exploration on this.
(Stretch) ResourceTiming: outline a plan to fix the problem of TAO (Timing-Allow-Origin) being an opt-in for non-timing information such as transferSize. This may mean using a new header or relying on some of the upcoming new security primitives in the web. If we have time this quarter, we’d like to begin tackling this problem by socializing a concrete proposal for a fix.
Paint Timing: change the Chromium implementation so it passes new web platform tests. These tests are based on the feedback from WebKit. They intend to ship First Contentful Paint in the near future!
Improve the documentation of our APIs on MDN and web.dev. We have been busily shipping new web perf APIs, but some of the documentation of them has lagged behind. For instance, we’ll make sure that there’s MDN pages on all of the new APIs we’ve shipped, and we’ll collaborate with DevRel to ensure that the documentation on web.dev is accurate.