UserTiming is one of the W3C specs that I helped design while working at Microsoft through the W3C WebPerf working group. It helps developers measure the performance of their web applications by giving them access to high precision timestamps. It also provides a standardized API that analytics scripts and developer tools can use to display performance metrics.
UserTiming is natively supported in IE 10 and prefixed in Chrome 25+. I wanted to use the interface for a few of my projects so I created a small polyfill to help patch other browsers that don’t support it natively. Luckily, a JavaScript version of UserTiming can be implemented and be 100% API functional — you just lose some precision and performance vs. native browser support.
So here it is: UserTiming.js
README:
UserTiming.js is a polyfill that adds UserTiming support to browsers that do not natively support it.
UserTiming is accessed via the PerformanceTimeline, and requires window.performance.now() support, so UserTiming.js adds a limited version of these interfaces if the browser does not support them (which is likely the case if the browser does not natively support UserTiming).
As of 2013-04-15, UserTiming is natively supported by the following browsers:
- IE 10+
- Chrome 25+ (prefixed)
UserTiming.js has been verified to add UserTiming support to the following browsers:
- IE 6-9
- Firefox 3.6+ (previous versions not tested)
- Safari 4.0.5+ (previous versions not tested)
- Opera 10.50+ (previous versions not tested)
UserTiming.js will detect native implementations of UserTiming, window.performance.now() and the PerformanceTimeline and will not make any changes if those interfaces already exist. When a prefixed version is found, it is copied over to the unprefixed name.
UserTiming.js can be found on GitHub and as the npm usertiming module.