The other side of the moon

There have been many additions to boomerang over the last few months. Among them include:

• Full navigation timing API support added by Buddy Brewer (@bbrewer)
• Measure IPv6 support and latency with the ipv6 plugin
• Measure the performance of "Instant Pages" in Google Chrome (v13+)

NavigationTiming

With the navtiming.js plugin, boomerang will beacon back the entire navigation timing object for browsers that support it (Chrome 6+ and IE 9+ and Firefox 6+ at this time). Use this information to gain far more insight into the user's browsing experience.

Docs here: http://yahoo.github.com/boomerang/doc/api/navtiming.html and here: http://yahoo.github.com/boomerang/doc/howtos/howto-9.html

IPv6

World IPv6 day is past, but IPv6 support still isn't universal. The ipv6.js plugin will help you find out if your users can access content over IPv6 and how that latency compares to whatever you currently provide. This does require server side setup though.

Docs here: http://yahoo.github.com/boomerang/doc/api/ipv6.html

Instant Pages

Google Chrome 13 has taken Mozilla's prefetch technology to the next level, introducing "prerender" -- a method to download and render the most likely next page before the user clicks on it, giving the appearance of the page loading Instantly when the user does click.

Boomerang is now prerender aware, and will check to see if a page was loaded through prerender or not. If it was, then boomerang measures a few more interesting times like the actual load time, the perceived load time, and the time from prerender completing to the page becoming visible.

Caveat: The measurement code causes current builds of Chrome 13 to crash. This bug appears to have been fixed in the nightlies (Chrome 14 Canary).

Docs here: http://yahoo.github.com/boomerang/doc/howtos/howto-10-page%231.html

I've been doing a lot of development on boomerang over the last few weeks. In particular around the WebTiming API. During Velocity this year, Microsoft announced that their latest release of IE9 supported this API, so I set about adding support to boomerang.

Since then, Google have announced support in Chrome as well, and there are rumours around that Mozilla plans on adding it to firefox. Now since the specification is still a draft, none of these browsers use the window.performance object, but instead use their own browser specific version. I've now added support for all these versions into boomerang.

More details in my post on the YDN blog.

You can get boomerang from github, and join the discussion on our forum.