alternative for HTML5 NavigationTiming on older browsers (IE8, IE7, IE6)?

Question

IE9 and chrome support the NavigationTiming JavaScript interface that simplifies the process of measuring user experience and site performance (also used by Google Analytics). Unfortunately, most of our site's users use IE8, IE7 or IE6. Does anyone know an alternative approach for retrieving this data?

The metric I'm most interested in is the time that elapsed from when the user first initiated the request for the page (eg clicked a link) to when the page finished loading.

Answer 1

Boomerang is an open-source project that helps you instrument navigation within your site by instrumenting the onbeforeunload event on the old page through the onload event on the destination page.

If the browser supports the NavigationTiming , it uses that instead.

Answer 2

The Javascript scope of the departing page will expire before the new page finishes loading, so I don't think you'll be able to achieve this without some extensive restructuring.

I'd use the YSlow Firebug plugin for some basic analysis and concentrate on optimizing the site itself.

Have you turned HTTP gzip compression on? Even if you're not using IIS6, Jeff Atwood had a pretty good take on the justifications: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/08/http-compression-and-iis-6-0.html

Answer 3

Seems like a possible alternative is to use instrumented links in order to record the time elapsed from the link click to when the page finished loading.

Another alternative is asking the users to install Google Toolbar for IE which adds the ability to measure this time.