Today many websites leverage Real User Measurement (RUM) technologies to measure and optimize user experience.

The primary method to collect the data is based on the Navigation Timing API spec from W3C. The API allows browsers to pass to website developers accurate timings for key milestones of loading a webpage.

The specification has been adopted by all browser vendors, but Apple. On Safari for Mac or iOS, developers and RUM providers have to rely on simple timers to measure the difference between page started rendering and browser loaded the document. This is not very accurate or sufficient to figure out what the performance of the page is.

Having an end-user experience blind spot is a problem, especially for mobile and tablet devices where Apple is the leader in market share. For example, iPad users made up 84.3% of all North American tablet traffic in June.

Therefore here is a petition to the Safari team to make the Navigation Timing API Spec a priority for next version of Safari.

Please sign the petition and spread the word!

Thank YouMehdi – CEO & Co-founder Catchpoint Systems

To: Apple

Dear Apple,

Every single day, I’m tasked with giving my end users the best possible web experience. To do so, I need to know how my website actually behaves out in the wild so accurate ways to measure how my website performs are absolutely critical.

Other browsers have included an API (and the W3C recommends it too) called Navigation Timing. It picks up on page requesting and rendering events so I can identify and optimize page loading bottlenecks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case in the current version of Safari. I’m surprised by this as Apple is usually at the forefront of improving end-user experiences.

I want my end users to have a better, faster experience on Safari and their Apple mobile devices, but I need your help. I’m joining a petition to add this API on an upcoming release – I think it will benefit everyone who works with or browses on Safari.

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely,