An analysis of Chromium's paint timing metrics
Here at SpeedCurve, we are continually gathering detailed performance data from tens of thousands of web pages. This gives us a relatively unique opportunity to analyse and aggregate performance metrics to gain some interesting insights. In this post, I'm going to analyse some browser-based paint timing metrics: First Paint & First Contentful Paint (defined in the Paint Timing spec and implemented in Chromium). I'm also going to analyse First Meaningful Paint (defined in a draft spec and implemented as a Chromium trace metric).
What are paint timing metrics?
The aim of almost any performance optimisation on the web is to improve the user experience. The folk at Google have been pushing this sentiment with a focus on user-centric performance metrics, which aim to answer four questions about users’ experiences:
- Is it happening? Is the page that I want to see actually loading?
- Is it useful? Has enough content rendered that I can engage with it?
- Is it usable? Can I scroll and interact with the page, or is it still loading?
- Is it delightful? Are my interactions with the page smooth?
First Paint (FP) measures the point at which pixels are first rendered to the screen after navigating to a new page. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is slightly more specific, in that it measures the point at which text or graphics are first rendered to the screen. Both of these metrics are available in Chromium browsers (Chrome, Opera, Samsung Internet, etc) via the Performance API: performance.getEntriesByType('paint').
The paint timing metrics are important because they aim to answer the first question: is it happening? My analysis will look at performance data from some popular websites in an attempt to figure out whether the paint timing metrics really do answer that question.
