Question

For some reason Google Page Speed, the add-on to Firebug, doesn’t show the “Paint Snapshots” option as seen on http://code.google.com/speed/articles/browser-paint-events.html

I’ve tried this with the latest version of Page Speed on Fx 7.0.1 with Firebug 1.8.3 and Fx 5.0.1 with Firebug 1.8.0. Both to no avail.

My question is thus: what am I missing here? If it just isn’t in anymore (all docs I can find are about Fx 3.x I believe), is there other software that does the same? That is, showing in fairly slow motion how a page is rendered, which assets are shown first, etc. For an example of what I’m looking for, click “Play Paint Events” at the URL above.

Answer 1

It looks like this feature was removed in an earlier version of Page Speed:

In the upcoming Page Speed 1.9 release, we will be removing the Page
Speed Activity panel. At the time of launch, Page Speed Activity
provided information unavailable in other tools like Firebug, such as
accurate DNS lookup timing, TCP connection timing, and JavaScript
parse/execution timing. As of Firefox 3.6, Firebug and other tools are
able to access the same DNS/TCP/network timing information as the Page
Speed Activity panel, and Firebug now displays this information in its
net panel. Thus, we have decided to remove the activity panel from
Page Speed since it duplicates information found in other popular
tools.

Page Speed Activity also provided JavaScript parse and execution
timing. However, in recent releases of Firefox, there was a noticeable
“observer effect” when profiling JavaScript parse and execution, which
made this timing information invalid.

Going forward, we recommend using an existing network waterfall tool
such as Firebug, HTTPWatch, Speed Tracer, or Chrome Developer Tools to
gather HTTP waterfall charts. Page Speed will continue to focus on
providing specific performance suggestions to make your sites faster.

Thank you, Bryan and the Page Speed team

I don’t know of a suitable replacement for the Play Paint Events capability. As Andy Davies mentioned, webpagetest.org does have a “video record” feature which captures the page as it’s being drawn, but perhaps not at the detail this tool used to have.