PerformanceNavigationTiming: activationStart property
Limited availability
This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.
Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.
The activationStart read-only property represents the time between when a document starts prerendering and when it is activated.
Value
A DOMHighResTimeStamp representing the duration between document prerendering start and activation in milliseconds.
The value is 0 if the page has not prerendered or is still prerendering.
Examples
Detecting prerendered pages
When a prerendered document is activated, activationStart is set to the current time. The following function can check whether a page is prerendering or has already prerendered:
function pagePrerendered() {
return (
document.prerendering ||
self.performance?.getEntriesByType?.("navigation")[0]?.activationStart > 0
);
}
Measuring user-perceived performance milestones
With prerendered pages, a page may have been created long before it was actually navigated to. When using the Performance API on prerendered pages, it is vital to compare returned values with activationStart in order to avoid misleading measurements.
// Time to when activation occurred
let activationStart =
performance.getEntriesByType("navigation")[0].activationStart;
// Time to first paint
let firstPaint = performance.getEntriesByName("first-paint")[0].startTime;
// Time to first contentful paint
let firstContentfulPaint = performance.getEntriesByName(
"first-contentful-paint",
)[0].startTime;
console.log(`time to first paint: ${firstPaint - activationStart}`);
console.log(
`time to first-contentful-paint: ${firstContentfulPaint - activationStart}`,
);
Specifications
| Specification |
|---|
| Prerendering Revamped # performance-navigation-timing-extension |
Browser compatibility
| desktop | mobile | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
activationStart
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Legend
Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.
- Full support
- Full support
- No support
- No support
- Experimental. Expect behavior to change in the future.