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This specification defines an interface for web applications to access the complete timing information for navigation of a document.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/.
Navigation Timing 2 replaces the first version of [NAVIGATION-TIMING] and includes the following changes:
This document was published by the Web Performance Working Group as a Working Draft using the Recommendation track.
Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by W3C and its Members.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
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This document is governed by the 03 November 2023 W3C Process Document.
This section is non-normative.
Accurately measuring performance characteristics of web applications is an important aspect of making web applications faster. While JavaScript-based mechanisms, such as the one described in [JSMEASURE], can provide comprehensive instrumentation for user latency measurements within an application, in many cases, they are unable to provide a complete or detailed end-to-end latency picture. For example, the following JavaScript shows a naive attempt to measure the time it takes to fully load a page:
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
var start = new Date().getTime();
function onLoad() {
var now = new Date().getTime();
var latency = now - start;
alert("page loading time: " + latency);
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="onLoad()">
<!- Main page body goes from here. -->
</body>
</html>
The above script calculates the time it takes to load the page after the first bit of JavaScript in the head is executed, but it does not give any information about the time it takes to get the page from the server, or the initialization lifecycle of the page.
This specification defines the PerformanceNavigationTiming
interface which participates in the [PERFORMANCE-TIMELINE-2] to store
and retrieve high resolution performance metric data related to the
navigation of a document. As the PerformanceNavigationTiming
interface uses [HR-TIME], all time values are measured with respect
to the time origin of the entry's
relevant settings object.
For example, if we know that the response end occurs 100ms after the
start of navigation, the PerformanceNavigationTiming
data could
look like so:
startTime: 0.000 // start time of the navigation request
responseEnd: 100.000 // high resolution time of last received byte
The following script shows how a developer can use the
PerformanceNavigationTiming
interface to obtain accurate timing
data related to the navigation of the document:
<script>
function showNavigationDetails() {
// Get the first entry
const [entry] = performance.getEntriesByType("navigation");
// Show it in a nice table in the developer console
console.table(entry.toJSON());
}
</script>
<body onload="showNavigationDetails()">
The construction "a Foo
object", where Foo
is
actually an interface, is sometimes used instead of the more accurate
"an object implementing the interface Foo
.
The term current document refers to the document associated with the Window object's newest Document object.
Throughout this work, all time values are measured in milliseconds since the start of navigation of the document. For example, the start of navigation of the document occurs at time 0. The term current time refers to the number of milliseconds since the start of navigation of the document until the current moment in time. This definition of time is based on [HR-TIME] specification.
This section is non-normative.
There is the potential for disclosing an end-user's browsing and activity history by using carefully crafted timing attacks. For instance, the unloading time reveals how long the previous page takes to execute its unload handler, which could be used to infer the user's login status. These attacks have been mitigated by enforcing the same origin check algorithm when unloading a document, as detailed in the HTML spec.
The relaxed same origin policy doesn't provide sufficient protection against unauthorized visits across documents. In shared hosting, an untrusted third party is able to host an HTTP server at the same IP address but on a different port.
Different pages sharing one host name, for example contents from different authors hosted on sites with user generated content are considered from the same origin because there is no feature to restrict the access by pathname. Navigating between these pages allows a latter page to access timing information of the previous one, such as timing regarding redirection and unload event.
This section is non-normative.
The PerformanceNavigationTiming
interface exposes timing
information about the previous document to the current document.
To limit the access to PerformanceNavigationTiming
attributes which
include information on the previous document, the
previous document
unloading algorithm enforces the same origin policy
and attributes related to the previous document are set to zero.
In case a proxy is deployed between the user agent and the web
server, the time interval between the connectStart
and the connectEnd
attributes indicates the delay between the user agent and the proxy
instead of the web server. With that, web server can potentially
infer the existence of the proxy. For SOCKS proxy, this time interval
includes the proxy authentication time and time the proxy takes to
connect to the web server, which obfuscate the proxy detection. In
case of an HTTP proxy, the user agent might not have any knowledge
about the proxy server at all so it's not always feasible to mitigate
this attack.
This section defines attributes and interfaces previously introduced in
[NAVIGATION-TIMING] Level 1 and are kept here for backwards
compatibility. Authors should not use the following interfaces and are
strongly advised to use the new
PerformanceNavigationTiming
interface—see summary
of changes and improvements.
WebIDL[Exposed=Window]
interface PerformanceTiming
{
readonly attribute unsigned long long unloadEventStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long unloadEventEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long redirectStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long redirectEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long fetchStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domainLookupStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domainLookupEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long connectStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long connectEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long secureConnectionStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long requestStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long responseStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long responseEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domLoading
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domInteractive
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domContentLoadedEventStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domContentLoadedEventEnd
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long domComplete
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long loadEventStart
;
readonly attribute unsigned long long loadEventEnd
;
[Default] object toJSON
();
};
All time values defined in this section are measured in milliseconds since midnight of .
navigationStart
This attribute must return the time immediately after the user agent finishes prompting to unload the previous document. If there is no previous document, this attribute must return the time the current document is created.
This attribute is not defined for
PerformanceNavigationTiming
. Instead, authors can use
timeOrigin
to obtain an equivalent timestamp.
unloadEventStart
If the previous document and the current document have the same origin, this attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent starts the unload event of the previous document. If there is no previous document or the previous document has a different origin than the current document, this attribute must return zero.
unloadEventEnd
If the previous document and the current document have the same same origin, this attribute must return the time immediately after the user agent finishes the unload event of the previous document. If there is no previous document or the previous document has a different origin than the current document or the unload is not yet completed, this attribute must return zero.
If there are HTTP
redirects when navigating and not all the redirects are from
the same origin, both
PerformanceTiming
.unloadEventStart
and
PerformanceTiming
.unloadEventEnd
must return zero.
redirectStart
If there are HTTP redirects when navigating and if all the redirects are from the same origin, this attribute must return the starting time of the fetch that initiates the redirect. Otherwise, this attribute must return zero.
redirectEnd
If there are HTTP redirects when navigating and all redirects are from the same origin, this attribute must return the time immediately after receiving the last byte of the response of the last redirect. Otherwise, this attribute must return zero.
fetchStart
If the new resource is to be fetched using a "GET" request method, fetchStart must return the time immediately before the user agent starts checking the HTTP cache. Otherwise, it must return the time when the user agent starts fetching the resource.
domainLookupStart
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user
agent starts the domain name lookup for the current document. If
a persistent
connection [RFC2616] is used or the current document is
retrieved from the HTTP cache or local resources, this attribute must
return the same value as PerformanceTiming
.fetchStart
.
domainLookupEnd
This attribute must return the time immediately after the user
agent finishes the domain name lookup for the current document.
If a persistent
connection [RFC2616] is used or the current document is
retrieved from the HTTP cache or local resources, this attribute must
return the same value as PerformanceTiming
.fetchStart
.
Checking and retrieving contents from the
HTTP cache [RFC2616] is part of the fetching
process. It's covered by the
PerformanceTiming
.requestStart
,
PerformanceTiming
.responseStart
and
PerformanceTiming
.responseEnd
attributes.
In case where the user agent already has the domain information in cache, domainLookupStart and domainLookupEnd represent the times when the user agent starts and ends the domain data retrieval from the cache.
connectStart
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user
agent start establishing the connection to the server to retrieve
the document. If a persistent
connection [RFC2616] is used or the current document is
retrieved from the HTTP cache or local resources, this attribute must
return value of PerformanceTiming
.domainLookupEnd
.
connectEnd
This attribute must return the time immediately after the user
agent finishes establishing the connection to the server to
retrieve the current document. If a persistent
connection [RFC2616] is used or the current document is
retrieved from the HTTP cache or local resources, this attribute must
return the value of PerformanceTiming
.domainLookupEnd
.
If the transport connection fails and the user agent reopens a
connection, PerformanceTiming
.connectStart
and
PerformanceTiming
.connectEnd
should return the corresponding
values of the new connection.
PerformanceTiming
.connectEnd
must include the time interval
to establish the transport connection as well as other time
interval such as SSL handshake and SOCKS authentication.
secureConnectionStart
This attribute is optional. User agents that don't have this attribute available must set it as undefined. When this attribute is available, if the scheme [URL] of the current page is "https", this attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent starts the handshake process to secure the current connection. If this attribute is available but HTTPS is not used, this attribute must return zero.
requestStart
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent starts requesting the current document from the server, or from the HTTP cache or from local resources.
If the transport connection fails after a request is sent and the
user agent reopens a connection and resend the request,
PerformanceTiming
.requestStart
should return the
corresponding values of the new request.
This interface does not include an attribute to represent the completion of sending the request, e.g., requestEnd.
responseStart
This attribute must return the time immediately after the user agent receives the first byte of the response from the server, or from the HTTP cache or from local resources.
responseEnd
This attribute must return the time immediately after the user agent receives the last byte of the current document or immediately before the transport connection is closed, whichever comes first. The document here can be received either from the server, the HTTP cache or from local resources.
domLoading
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent sets the current document readiness to "loading".
Due to differences in when a Document object is created in
existing user agents, the value returned by the
domLoading
is implementation specific and should not
be used in meaningful metrics.
domInteractive
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent sets the current document readiness to "interactive".
domContentLoadedEventStart
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user
agent fires the
DOMContentLoaded event at the Document
.
domContentLoadedEventEnd
This attribute must return the time immediately after the document's DOMContentLoaded event completes.
domComplete
This attribute must return the time immediately before the user agent sets the current document readiness to "complete".
If the current document
readiness changes to the same state multiple times,
PerformanceTiming
.domLoading
,
PerformanceTiming
.domInteractive
,
PerformanceTiming
.domContentLoadedEventStart
,
PerformanceTiming
.domContentLoadedEventEnd
and
PerformanceTiming
.domComplete
must return the time of the
first occurrence of the corresponding document readiness
change.
loadEventStart
This attribute must return the time immediately before the load event of the current document is fired. It must return zero when the load event is not fired yet.
loadEventEnd
This attribute must return the time when the load event of the current document is completed. It must return zero when the load event is not fired or is not completed.
toJSON()
WebIDL[Exposed=Window]
partial interface Performance
{
[SameObject]
readonly attribute PerformanceTiming
timing
;
};
The Performance
interface is defined in
[PERFORMANCE-TIMELINE-2].
timing
The timing
attribute represents the timing
information related to the browsing contexts since the last
non-redirect navigation. This attribute is defined by the
PerformanceTiming
interface.
navigation
The navigation
attribute is defined by the
PerformanceNavigation
interface.
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines, diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
The key word SHOULD in this document is to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.
Thanks to Anne Van Kesteren, Arvind Jain, Boris Zbarsky, Jason Weber, Jonas Sicking, James Simonsen, Karen Anderson, Nic Jansma, Philippe Le Hegaret, Steve Souders, Todd Reifsteck, Tony Gentilcore, William Chan and Zhiheng Wang for their contributions to this work.
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