2010-06-12

Google BOM feature: ms since pageload

I expect this feature has been around for quite a while already, but this is the first time I have seen it: stealthy browser object model improvements letting a web page figure out how many milliseconds ago it was loaded. It presumably works in any web browser that is Chrome or that runs the Google Toolbar:

function msSincePageLoad() {
try {
var t = null;
if (window.chrome && chrome.csi)
t = chrome.csi().pageT;
if (t === null && window.gtbExternal)
t = window.gtbExternal.pageT();
if (t === null && window.external)
t = window.external.pageT;
} catch (e) {};
return t;
}


In Chrome it (chrome.csi().pageT, that is) even reports the time with decimals, for sub-millisecond precision.

Google, this kind of browser improvements should be blogged! Maybe even documented. All I caught in a brief googling for it were two now-garbage-collected tweets by Paul Irish, leading to where it was committed to Chromium, and a screenshot of the feature in action, along with all the other related features not brought up now:



The rest of this post, about how I happened upon it myself, is probably only interesting to the insatiably curious:

Upon having grown weary of all the Chinese automated porn/malware comment spam that passes through Blogger's sub-par spam filtering to my moderation inbox, I decided to replace it with one that is maintained by a service specializing in (and presumably committed to!) blog comments: Disqus. In the process, being lazy, I decided to let their template wizard install itself in my blog template, which required dropping my old blogger template, upgrading it a few versions, and then (only required by my own discerning taste) attempting to manually weed out the worst crud from the new template (none of which was added by Disqus, I might add).

In the apparently uneditable <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/> section, sat a minified version of approximately this code, which seems to look up the vertical position of some latency-testing DOM node passed to it, the first time the visitor scrolls the page, if it's above the fold (which in Blogger's world is apparently a constant 750 pixels into the page :-). And maybe other things.

(function() {
function Ticker(x) {
this.t = {};
this.tick = function tick(name, data, time) {
time = time ? time : (new Date).getTime();
this.t[name] = [time, data];
};
this.tick("start", null, x);
}

window.jstiming = {
Timer: Ticker,
load: new Ticker
};

try {
var pt = null;
if (window.chrome && window.chrome.csi)
pt = Math.floor(window.chrome.csi().pageT);
if (pt == null && window.gtbExternal)
pt = window.gtbExternal.pageT();
if (pt == null && window.external)
pt = window.external.pageT;
if (pt) window.jstiming.pt = pt;
} catch (e) {};

window.tickAboveFold = function tickAboveFold(node) {
var y = 0;
if (node.offsetParent) {
do y += node.offsetTop;
while ((node = node.offsetParent))
}
if (y <= 750) window.jstiming.load.tick("aft");
};

var alreadyLoggedFirstScroll = false;

function onScroll() {
if (!alreadyLoggedFirstScroll) {
alreadyLoggedFirstScroll = true;
window.jstiming.load.tick("firstScrollTime");
}
}

if (window.addEventListener)
window.addEventListener("scroll", onScroll, false);
else
window.attachEvent("onscroll", onScroll);
})();
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