Changelog

When you’re tasked with monitoring performance for numerous websites, it can be challenging to keep up-to-date with the status of each one. It’s even harder to know when to take action.

Because of this, it’s easy to be unaware of performance issues until they become critical. Gathering data can be time-consuming and often requires manual effort.

Today, we’re excited to announce Team Insights, a new monthly high-level report that provides an easy-to-read summary of all Sites tracked in each team workspace.

Each month, you can receive a Team Insights report for all the team workspaces that you’re a member of.

The report includes:

• Straight-forward data: Site’s performance metrics are evaluated and categorised into groups: Regressed, Improved, and Stable.
• Comparison to the previous month: Each Site’s data is compared to the previous month. e.g.: August vs September.
• Metrics at a glance: Each metric is colour-coded to indicate the severity of performance impact and significant changes to metrics are highlighted.
• Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX): Core Web Vitals metrics collected from real-user sessions. (Where available)
• Core Web Vitals Assessment: Clear indication of whether a Site is passing or failing Core Web Vitals.
• Synthetic monitoring summary: See key metrics Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Total Blocking Time.

With this report, you can quickly see which Sites need attention, and also enjoy confirmation of hard-fought improvements.

Team Insights is available to all Calibre pricing plans and is automatically delivered on the 1st of each month. Team members can opt-out of Team Insights from notification settings if that’s their preference.

The first report will arrive 1st of November, or write to us if you would like early access.

We hope you find Team Insights a valuable addition to your performance monitoring workflow.

We are retiring the First Input Delay (FID) and Time to Interactive (TTI) metrics from Calibre.

Here's what you need to know:

• First Input Delay has been removed from Google's CrUX dataset, Calibre has removed FID from CrUX Dashboard and Pages reports.
• Time to Interactive was removed from Google Lighthouse in version 10. Calibre has removed TTI from Snapshot Overview. TTI will still be collected during synthetic tests, though it is no longer a recommended metric.

Going forward, we recommend using Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a replacement for First Input Delay and Total Blocking Time (TBT) as a replacement for Time to Interactive.

Today, we're excited to unveil a new Dark UI theme for Calibre, offering you a sleek and comfortable alternative to our standard light interface.

This new theme is designed for those who prefer a darker interface, need increased contrast, or work in low-light environments.

Dark mode will automatically activate if your operating system is set to dark mode.

You can also manually switch between Dark and Light modes from the user menu in the top right corner.

In addition to the new dark mode, there are numerous improvements to address UI interaction bugs, improve text legibility and boost colour contrast for a more polished experience.

These changes include:

• Improved UI spacing to reduce horizontal scrolling on data heavy reports.
• Chart tooltip contrast and legibility improvements.
• Global Site search visual stability and usability enhancements.

There's a lot of small changes and improvements in this release and we hope you enjoy the new dark mode.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on how dark mode could be improved for you, please let us know.

When viewing a Synthetic test, you can now see if a metric has exceeded budget thresholds.

To learn more about budgets, see the Creating a performance budget guide.

As of today, newly created Sites will have 2 Test Profiles: PageSpeed Desktop and PageSpeed Mobile.

PageSpeed Desktop and PageSpeed Mobile Test Profiles run on Calibre infrastructure using the same simulated networking conditions as Google PageSpeed Insights.

Prior to this change, new Sites were created with Test Profiles using runtime network throttling. Simulated throttling comes with the added benefit of tests that complete faster, so you can get results quicker.

The new defaults are designed to provide a test environment that is more consistent with Google’s PageSpeed, while still encompassing the power and flexibility of Calibre's configurable synthetic monitoring platform.

This change will not affect existing Sites, however you can switch between Test Profile devices at any time by navigating to Site Settings → Test Profiles. Runtime network throttling is still available for all Sites.

New Sites created using Node.js API or Command-Line Client (CLI) will use these new default Test Profiles. You can optionally specify Test Profile settings when creating a Site using the API. if that’s more suitable for your workflow.

For more information on Test Profiles, see the Test Profile documentation.

Our Test Agents are now using Lighthouse 12.2.0 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 12.2.0 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 127 to test your Sites.

On September 1st 2024, synthetic Test Agents will default to dynamic IP addresses. With this change, Test Agents will use a range of IP addresses to access your Sites, rather than a single fixed IP address.

In preparation for this change, you can select fixed IP addresses for each Site from Test Agent settings. Fixed IPs remain available for all Sites, and you can switch between dynamic and fixed IPs at any time.

Fixed IP addresses are helpful if you have a web application firewall, rate limiting, analytics or other security measures that limit traffic from unknown IP addresses.

If you have any questions, or require help in switching existing sites to fixed IPs, please contact support, we’ll be happy to help.

We've added a new metric to CrUX Dashboard and Pages reports: Round Trip Time (RTT).

Round trip time data is newly available to Google's Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) dataset.

RTT measures the time it takes for a request to travel from browser to server, and back.

Round trip time is a valuable metric to understand latency that customers experience, alongside Time to First Byte.

Using the updated CrUX Dashboard and Pages reports, you can:

• Understand the latency experienced by visitors to your site
• Compare Desktop, Mobile and Tablet round trip time data
• Identify trends in latency over time

At the moment CrUX includes 75th percentile (p75) data for RTT, with histogram data likely available in the future.

Requests initiated by <link rel="preload"> or Early Hints are now displayed with a visual indicator in the Network request table.

Preload and early hints help to improve page performance by hinting to the browser which requests are critical to render primary content quickly.

By carefully employing these techniques you can ensure that essential resources like hero images, CSS or Fonts are prioritised, leading to faster Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and less layout shifts (CLS).

Using the Network request table, you can now quickly identify these requests and ensure that essential resources are prioritised accordingly.

Read more about optimising critical requests and early hints.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 126 and Lighthouse 12.1.0 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 12.0.0 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 124 and Lighthouse 12.0.0 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 12.0.0 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

In February, we launched CrUX Dashboard to help you understand how your site performs in the real world.

Today, we're excited to announce the CrUX Pages Leaderboard, a new feature that provides a high-level overview of your Page’s Core Web Vitals performance, based on real-user data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).

The CrUX Pages Leaderboard is available for all Sites tracked in Calibre.

Now you can:

• Quickly see Core Web Vitals data for all your Pages
• Sort to find the best and worst performing Pages
• Drill down to see more detailed data for each Page
• Filter by form factor (Desktop, Tablet or Phone)
• Observe recent trends for all reported Web Vitals metrics:
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB)
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP)

Learn more about the CrUX Pages Leaderboard report.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 123 and Lighthouse 11.7.1 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 11.7.1 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

Starting in Chrome 122, new functionality introduced a regression that caused Lighthouse to misreport Total Blocking Time (TBT) for pages with long main thread tasks. In these cases, we observed an increase to TBT measurements and long task visualisation.

While the issue has not yet been resolved in Chrome 123+, Calibre took action by disabling the responsible functionality using Chrome feature flags. Additionally, Lighthouse 11.7.1 includes a fix that removes overlapping long tasks from browser trace processing.

Calibre helped to identify the issue and pinpoint the offending functionality that caused the regression in tandem with the Lighthouse core team. With these fixes in place, affected pages will now report accurate Total Blocking Time measurements.

In addition to the above changes, Calibre also adjusted First Contentful Paint (FCP) timeout from 45 seconds to 15 (the Lighthouse default). If you've observed NO_FCP errors as a result of this change, you may want to consider adjusting Test Profile settings so that FCP is lower than 15 seconds. Please contact support for assistence or advice, we're always happy to help.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 122 and Lighthouse 11.6.0 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 11.6.0 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

We know that real user data is a critical part of modern web performance monitoring. In January, we added real user data for Core Web Vitals to Your Sites page. Today, to expand your ability to assess how real visitors experience your sites and apps, we released a Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) Dashboard:

The CrUX Dashboard is available for all Sites tracked in Calibre. Now you can:

• quickly check the Core Web Vitals assessment status
• track real-user session data without additional costs and scripts
• see if the majority of sessions have a good experience
• observe trends in six key performance metrics (including Interaction to Next Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and Time to First Byte)

Learn more about the CrUX Dashboard report.

React Live Chat Loader now provides full support for HubSpot and Front live chat services.

The latest release (2.9.1) also sees ES5 support reinstated in ESM builds.

Thanks to all the contributors whose efforts helped make this release possible. The full changelog is available on GitHub.

Our Test Agents are now using Chrome 120 and Lighthouse 11.4.0 to test your Sites. You can find details surrounding the 11.4.0 release in the official Lighthouse changelog.

Web performance data can come from a myriad of sources (synthetic testing and real user tracking), both useful for different use cases. Many teams are currently looking for real user data, which is why, we are adding Core Web Vitals data to a refreshed Your Sites dashboard, sourced from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).

With the new Your Sites dashboard you can:

• check Core Web Vitals data from synthetic and real-user data sources
• rank websites based on a metric
• monitor a new metric: Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

This change is especially helpful if you haven’t tracked real user data yet, or you’d like to broaden your monitoring with Chrome’s dataset, which is used for Google Search ranking purposes.

Early this year, you can expect a full, chart-based Core Web Vitals dashboard based on Chrome User Experience Report, but for now, Your Sites page is accessible for each Team under Team → Sites (or here).

Learn more about the metrics and methodology on the Your Sites report documentation page.