Improvements
Doubled the limit of PageAction events per harvest
Up to 120 PageAction events can be harvested every 30 seconds.
Removed call to /ping endpoint
Removed a legacy behavior used to ensure network connection was kept alive in IE 7/8/9.
Bug Fixes
Prevent duplicate session trace nodes
The final Session Trace node in a harvest, captured using the Resource Timing API, is no longer duplicated in the subsequent harvest.
This issue lead to 1 duplicate node in a Session Trace, every 10 seconds, over the duration of the trace.
Memory overhead when agent script
Fixed a memory leak in the agent when the network request to load the second part of the agent is blocked.
Update to file protocol restriction
Fixed an error thrown in the console when the agent is loaded using the file:// protocol caused by features in the agent trying to run when others had been aborted.
setTimeouts without callback functions
Fixed an issue where route change Browser Interactions would wait forever if a setTimeout was called without a callback function (passing code in as a string in the first argument) as the first argument.
Cypress.io
Fixed a conflict between the Browser agent and the Cypress.io test framework when instrumenting XMLHttpRequest.
Improvements
Retry harvest network requests
The agent retries harvest XHR requests when it receives 408, 429, 500 or 503 response codes. Additionally, includes a security update to address NR21-01.
File protocol disallowed
The agent will not report any data when it is on a page opened from a local file.
Improvements
Updated mechanism for collecting data
The agent now sends JS errors and AJAX metrics data as body of a standard XHR request. This makes it possible to send more data than the maximum allowed length of URL query string.
Improvements
Optimized instrumentation of promises
The promise instrumentation has been updated to reduce performance overhead on web sites that use large number of promises.
Issue Resolutions
Fixed issue with SPA overhead
In a rare case where large number of callbacks are executed at the end of an interaction, the agent could cause a significant overhead. This has been fixed in this version of the agent.
Fixed issue with Fetch instrumentation
Updated fetch instrumentation to account for cases when the function argument is a URL object.
New Features
Added support for custom attributes on PageViewTiming events
Custom attributes created using the setCustomAttribute API method will now be included in all PageViewTiming events.
Issue Resolutions
[SPA- BrowserInteractions] Fixed an issue resulting from too many fetch requests
- Resolved a bug throwing a null reference error during browser interactions where more than 128 fetch requests were recorded and distributed tracing was enabled.
[PageViewTiming] Fixed an edge-case issue with the paint timing instrumentation
- In cases when nothing was painted to screen before the load event, the agent would throw an error. We have added a guard for this scenario.
[PageViewTiming] Fixed issue with Largest Contentful Paint recording
- The browser agent stops recording largest contentful paint after 60 seconds on a page. We fixed an issue where recording continued beyond that threshold.
How to upgrade your agent
For instructions for upgrading your agent, please view our docs.
New Features
We are excited to announce the release of Cumulative Layout Shift, the third and final metric in Google's Core Web Vitals. This metric is an important, user-centric metric for measuring visual stability because it helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts—a low CLS helps ensure that the page is delightful. The current set for 2020 Core Web Vitals focuses on three aspects of the user experience—loading, interactivity, and visual stability—and includes the following metrics (and their respective thresholds):
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1. For each of the above metrics, to ensure you're hitting the recommended target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices. To learn more about the research and methodology behind these recommendations, see: Defining the Core Web Vitals metrics thresholds. Tools that assess Core Web Vitals compliance should consider a page passing if it meets the recommended targets at the 75th percentile for all of the above three metrics.
How does the Browser Agent report this data?
The agent now collects CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) values as attributes on PageViewTiming events. CLS measures how much layout of the page shifts and is represented as a score. All types of PageViewTiming events (except FP and FCP) include this attribute, showing the score up until the point the timing measurement was taken. You can now track your CLS score throughout the page loading cycle to better understand and focus your optimization work on the moment in time where you are experiencing the worst scores.
We have also added two new events to the PageViewTiming event, pageHide and windowLoad to complete the full page load journey. These timings are useful with its CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) attribute to paint the picture of a user's journey through the load experience.
- The pageHide event represents the first time that the page was hidden (e.g. by switching browser tab). Note that we only collect the first pageHide events at this point.
- The windowLoad event is fired when the whole page has loaded, including all dependent resources such as stylesheets and images.
For more information, please visit our docs on the PageViewTiming event.
Issue Fixes
- [PageViewTiming event] Fixed unrealistic high values for FI & FID Older browsers report Event.timeStamp as an epoch time instead of value relative to the page navigation start. The agent took this into account for FI (First Interaction) timing values but not for FID (First Input Delay). With this fix, there should no longer be unrealistic outlier values for FID.
How to upgrade your agent
For instructions for upgrading your agent, please view our docs.
New Features
Browser in distributed tracing now supports W3C trace context headers. W3C Trace Context is a standard that makes distributed tracing easier to implement, more reliable, and ultimately more valuable for developers working with modern, highly distributed applications. The standard greatly simplifies use cases where developers instrument services using tools from different distributed tracing solutions. Now all tracers and agents that conform to the W3C Trace Context standard can participate in a trace. Trace data can be propagated from the root service all the way to the terminal service.
Once Distributed Tracing is turned on in your Browser Application Settings page, the trace context headers will be added by default, along with the newrelic proprietary header, for same origin AJAX requests. If your system is fully configured to send w3c trace context throughout all services, you can choose to disable the newrelic header from the Application setting tab.
For cross origin AJAX requests already configured to accept the newrelic header, you can now select the option to send the W3C trace context headers. When selected, all origins defined must be configured to accept the traceparent and tracestate headers. For information on configuring CORS headers, please see our docs page for an example. As with the same origin requests, if you system is fully configured for W3C trace context headers, you can choose to disable the newrelic header.
For more information, please see our New Relic Support for W3C Trace Context blog post.
The following New Relic agents now support W3C:
- Browser Pro+SPA agent 1173 and higher
- Java 5.1.0 and higher
- Python 5.5 and higher
- Go 3.1.0 and higher
- Node.js 6.4 and higher
- Ruby 6.9.0 and higher
- PHP 9.8 and higher
- .NET 8.27 and higher
New Features
Privacy: Added the ability for admin users to toggle cookie collection On/Off via Browser Application Settings UI
The agent now accepts new configuration privacy.cookies_enabled. When it is set to false (OFF), the agent doesn't write any third party cookies (JSESSIONID & NREUM) and it also notifies the intake server to not return a third party cookie. By default, all current and newly created applications will have this value set to true (ON), so there will be no change in the data currently being collected by the agent. Admin users must toggle the setting to OFF and redeploy the agent in order to see this change take effect. Once cookie collection is set to false, users should no longer see session information captured with their event data. If a session was already in progress, that data will continue to be collected until that session expires. New sessions should report a null value.
Please note that auto-injected apps will receive this update before the UI option is available. See release dates below.
To learn more about how New Relic Browser uses cookies, see our documentation. For more information on security considerations, specifically around cookies, visit our Security for Browser documentation.
Release Dates
- Auto-injected apps - May 28, 2020
- Copy/paste apps - June 1, 2020
- Corresponding UI changes - June 1, 2020
Issues Resolved
Fixed issue with document XHR requests
In some cases, the agent was causing a DOMException error when getting the size of XHR responses for requests with document response type.
Issue Resolution
Resolved a bug that caused a script error when the windowUnload event fired. This issue affected only Internet Explorer prior to version 9.
New Features
With this release of the New Relic Browser agent, we now support new metrics, largestContentfulPaint and windowUnload, in our PageViewTiming event. With the release of Chrome 77, Google now reports a metric called largest contentful paint. This metric, LCP for short, reports the render time of the largest content element visible in the viewport, along with the element size and element Id values. This new metric comes after extensive research by Google. They found that the more accurate way to measure when the main content of a page is loaded is to look at when the largest element was rendered. Largest Contentful Paint is replacing First Meaningful Paint (which is now a deprecated metric) in Google Lighthouse as well. Additionally, LCP is considered the "field" equivalent to the Speed Index "lab" metric.
Largest Contentful Paint is updated over time, but captured and reported when one of these three criteria is met:
- A user interacts with the page, thus potentially changing the content in the viewport
- The user closes the page (the window unload event fires)
- If no other other interaction happens, and we have received a LCP value, we will report that value after 1 minute has passed
- If we have not received a value, and no interaction has occurred after a minute, we will simply wait until we have received any value for LCP. This would only occur for very high values (> 1minute) of LCP.
In addition to this metric, we added the windowUnload event to PageViewTiming, so you can see when your users are most commonly closing their sessions. This metric is supported by all browsers on both desktop and mobile devices.
For more information about these new metrics, supporting attributes and browser compatibility, visit our PageViewTiming documentation.
Issue Fixes
- Fix to resolve repeated InvalidStateError errors associated with IE11 and some Edge versions.
How to upgrade
To upgrade your agent to the latest version, see Upgrade the Browser agent.