New Relic Browser: Tracking User Experience with First Paint and First Contentful Paint Metrics

Modern websites require dynamic performance metrics to assess user experience, beyond traditional timing metrics used in Web 1.0. New Relic Browser now supports two user-centric perceived performance metrics: first paint and first contentful paint, which measure when a user perceives a page as beginning to render. These metrics are crucial for understanding how quickly users see content and can interact with webpages, addressing the limitations of conventional page-load-time metrics. Available in Google Chrome and Opera, these metrics are integrated into New Relic One dashboards and can be utilized to create alerts and track performance trends. By focusing on these metrics, web development teams can optimize user experience by better understanding the visual rendering of content, and New Relic plans to expand its metric offerings to further enhance usability and site utility assessments.