Second Meaningful Content: the Worst Performance Metric | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

I rather like Scott’s term for what happens when you use client-side JavaScript for A/B testing.

This pattern leads to such a unique effect on page load that at last week’s Perf.Now() Conference, I coined a new somewhat tongue-in-cheek performance metric called “Second Meaningful Content,” which occurs long after the handy First Meaningful Content (or Paint) metric, which would otherwise mark the time at which a page starts to appear usable.