Browsers provide detailed performance information about every resource a webpage loads. Most of this information is hidden during cross-origin requests however. This is a common problem since pages often load content from a variety of origins. Pages can access cross-origin timing information if an additional header is added to cross-origin responses.

Starting software products is hard, and it’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve started a lot of products – and we’ve made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. But that’s not going to stop us. We’re stubborn like that. Today we are launching Request Metrics for the third time, and I’m reflecting on what we did wrong in the first two attempts, and how we’re going to be better, faster, and strong next time.

Kent C Dodds made a claim on Twitter (X) that the “biggest performance problems are probably backend, not frontend related.” Is this true? Some websites have slow backends, for sure. Others have slow frontends. A few unfortunate sites are slow in both. But as of today, right now in 2023, which is the bigger performance problem for most teams, the frontend or the backend? I wanted to explore it with some real data from the web.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a newer addition to the Core Web Vital metrics intended to measure how real users perceive the responsiveness of modern web applications. Web Vitals Measurements like INP are becoming increasingly important as web applications and SPA’s run more JavaScript on the client side.

That thing where you are so pissed at a broken web application that you furiously click the button or link. Yea, we all do that. Rage clicking, or repeatedly clicking out of frustration, is a common experience for many users. However, while rage clicking may seem like a harmless expression of frustration, it can lead to negative outcomes for both users and businesses. It’s also a fantastic way to detect user frustration.

Website performance is critical to understand user experience and engagement, but there are so many different metrics! What do they all mean? Not to worry, dear reader, I got your back. Let’s break down Time to Interactive or TTI, why you should care about it, and how to make it blazingly fast. In today’s fast-paced digital world 🙄, website performance plays a crucial role in user experience and engagement.

We just released support for custom metadata in Request Metrics! Metadata allows you to describe your user, session, application, environment, account, A/B Test, or whatever else is meaningful for you. You can add metadata through the browser agent API, and report & filter on it in the Reporting UI.

A Request Metrics customer asked for some help troubleshooting poor scores on their Core Web Vitals, specifically the Largest Contentful Paint. I did a deep dive on their site and recorded my debugging session, so you can see how I went about finding the root cause.

Google Analytics was the go-to analytics tool. It set the standard, we all learned on it, and we all used it. But Google Analytics 4? It’s a nightmare. I’ve tried to figure it out for weeks and it’s just…confusing.

Seems like everyone is building a ChatGPT thing right now, doesn’t it? Well we are too! Inspired by so many others, we decided to see what AI could do with our simplified analytics and observability data. Turns out, it can do quite a lot. I’m thrilled to share that we’ve shipped our first AI insights chatbot, Professor Sloth.