How to detect slow internet connections?

Question

You can start a timeout in an inline script block in <head>, which will be run as soon as it’s encountered. You would then cancel the timeout when the load event fires. If the timeout ever fires, the page is loading slowly. For example:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var slowLoad = window.setTimeout( function() {
        alert( "the page is taking its sweet time loading" );
    }, 10 );

    window.addEventListener( 'load', function() {
        window.clearTimeout( slowLoad );
    }, false );
</script>

Obviously you would want to replace the alert with something a little more useful. Also note that the example uses the W3C/Netscape event API and thus won’t work in Internet Explorer before version 9.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply