[webkit-dev] WebKit position on Paint Timing / (first paint, first contentful paint)

[Noam Rosenthal]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 12:17 PM Yoav Weiss <yoav at yoav.ws> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 11:33 PM Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> I don't think we should do that. For starters, Chrome's painting strategy
>> while loading a web page is very different from that of Safari / WebKit. We
>> would freeze the painting of the previous page at the moment a new
>> navigation is committed, and we wouldn't update the painting until the
>> destination page has a meaningful content in it. This is a very much
>> different from Chrome's model where the moment a new navigation is
>> committed, Chrome will show a blank page then start incrementally painting
>> the page throughout the navigation.
>>
> Body background color is still painted before any contentful paint... Is
this a bug?
Also, a web page might not have content at all (e.g. a bunch of divs with
bgcolors). Would webkit not render that web page at all?

>
>> Second off, the point of specification is to allow multiple independent
>> implementations. If we had to reverse-engineer what Chrome is doing and
>> implement that, it defeats the point of having any standard at all.
>>
>
> With my WebPerfWG hat on, I agree. Would be good to find a model that
> works well for different implementations (even if not comparable between
> different implementations), while providing points in time for developers
> that can: a) provide a user meaningful visual metric and b) enable spotting
> regressions.
>
Note taken. Though this is hypothetical - let's get to the point where the
spec is lacking, and then we can decide how to go about it.
What I propose is to go as far as possible with the spec, and when we reach
an ambiguity tackle it on the spec front.

>
> Would WebKit folks be interested in helping exploration on that front?
>
I would be happy to help coordinate this (e.g. work on the details of pec
differences and prod Ryosuke and folks for feedback about internals).


>
>> I don't think we don't should that because we don't have an equivalent of
>> first-paint.
>>
>
> FWIW, I don't think it's a huge problem if WebKit will report FP and FCP
> as the same timestamp, as they are indeed the same point in time.
>
A simple test shows that safari does show the background color
(body=bgcolor) when a timeout is set to render everything else (e.g. add
text to the document). According to the spec, the first one should give
first-paint and the second one would be first-contentful-paint.
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