Hi Folks,
Is there a tool out there to measure the actual Render time of an element(s) on a page? I don't mean download time of the resources, but the actual time the browser took to render something. I know that this time would vary based on factors on the client machine, but would still be very handy in knowing what the rendering engine takes a while to load. I would imagine this should be a useful utility since web apps are becoming pretty client heavy now. Any thoughts?
You can check out YSlow.
Edit: It seems to me that firebug shows the rendering time with a blue and red line in the net panel.
I would suggest YSlow.
It not only measures performance times of the elements in your page but it also analyzes your page design to suggest how you can make performance improvements. It is one of the tools they used in the development of Stack Overflow.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarizes the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
The above method does not say anything about the time it takes to render a page. It only tells you how much time it took to execute the javascript, including the transfer of data from the javascript engine to the html parser.