New Recorder Tab in Chrome DevTools

[NickMNS]

A new recorder tab was added to Chrome DevTools. I'm not sure when this was added but I just decided to check it out today (despite the fact that I use devTools 24/7). It looks interesting, but i haven't really had the need to use it for any real tasks, but now that I know it's there, thing will surely start looking like nails.

Here is the explanatory video from Google.
[developer.chrome.com...]

[martinibuster]

First Input Delay has become a meaningless metric because everyone gets a good score on it. What's the value of an award if everyone gets a trophy, right?

So Google is developing a new metric that measures the full duration of an interaction, which is a meaningful metric for page experience.

"The main point to understand about this new metric is that it isn’t measuring just single interactions. It is measuring groups of individual interactions that are part of a user action."

There are multiple articles by Google and related events that happened that I reported on here:

Google Is Creating A New Core Web Vitals Metric

[searchenginejournal.com...]

[robzilla]

This should probably be a separate thread, but I don't really see the link between CMS and FID. First Input Delay depends on what happens on the front-end, not the back-end. There are lots of poorly written WordPress templates that can be responsible for a high FID (e.g. lots of complex javascript), rather than WordPress itself. I'm sure that the measurement can be improved or expanded upon, but a high FID is still a poor user experience, and 10% of URLs failing to meet the bar is still significant. It's probably more of an issue in areas where devices are, on average, less powerful than, say, in Europe or the US. Like most other vitals, a high FID is also more common on less popular sites than on popular ones, so the sites with the most traffic will drive up the average number of "Good FID" measurements while it can still be a significant issue on less popular sites.

Most sites don't do keyword stuffing or hidden text these days, so they all get that "trophy", but you still want to have the signal in place.

[martinibuster]

WP has a new performance team that is in the process of creating plans for future improvements to the back end for page speed experience. So there is some impact from the CMS side.

One example is lazy loading and how they did a blanket fix that included the hero image, which caused a problem but not enough to negate the gains. So now they're fixing that (if it's not already fixed).

Another example is the Gutenberg editor was loading styles and scripts for every single block, including blocks not in use. The time to interactive can't happen until all the styles are loaded up. I don't know if fixing that problem improved their FID, but that is one situation where standard coding practices needed to change to improve CWV.

I'm going from memory, but I believe that under discussion is creating standards for the theme and plugin community to follow. That's not back end but it is leadership from the back end side.

WP performance, and that of many other platforms, are mostly improving. So it does seem like something is going on in the back end.

Circling back, that relatively new functionality in the Dev Tools probably relates to the new metric that's under development.

[robzilla]

WordPress certainly has a responsibility for improving performance, so that's good news. But the genie's already out of the bottle, of course. It's mostly thanks to Google that theme creators are now putting more work into making their themes more performant. But a little extra nudge from WordPress would be helpful.

We already had the recorder in the Performance tab, but playback of user flow is a great addition. Really helps zoom in on the performance of specific user interactions.

[martinibuster]

Really helps zoom in on the performance of specific user interactions.

Yes! I agree. That's a very useful function.