Microsoft, Google Co-chair W3C Web Performance Working Group

Microsoft has been selected to co-chair a new World Wide Web Consortium working group, the W3C Web Performance Working Group, which aims to help measure application performance on the Web.

Microsoft will co-chair the group with Google. In an Aug. 18 blog post about Microsoft's participation in the group, Jason Weber, Microsoft's lead program manager for IE Performance, said, "Enabling Web developers to understand the real-world performance characteristics of their applications is critical to the success of HTML5, and we're excited to have been selected as co-chairs of the new working group alongside Google. We look forward to partnering with the W3C and the broader Web community to enable these scenarios through an interoperable API."

Weber added, "The first deliverable for the working group is to recommend an API that measures the performance of browser navigations. The WebTimings specification provides a good starting point for these capabilities, so this specification will move into the Web Performance Working Group and become the foundation for our recommendations."

Weber said the third Platform Preview of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 browser was "the first browser to implement these portions of the WebTimings specification." Moreover, "Following standard conventions, we used a vendor prefix (ms) on the name because the specification was still under active development and hadn't been brought into the charter of any working group. Google also recently provided an early implementation of these APIs inside Chrome using their vendor prefix (webkit). Through early collaboration between our engineering teams, we almost have interoperable implementations, which is impressive for an API that has only been discussed for a few months. This is a great example of what's possible through collaborative partnerships at the W3C."

Meanwhile, Weber said, "With two early implementations available," it should not be long before the working group can "finalize an interoperable API and remove the vendor prefixes." However, Weber said the working group hopes to get input from the user community before finalizing on an implementation. "In preparation, you can try out these APIs using the IE 9 Platform Preview or Chrome 6 nightly builds," he said. "To help you get started, take a look at the msPerformance demo on the IE 9 TestDrive [site,] which shows these APIs in action."