Chrome: find out WHEN a page was loaded

Question

I happen to have a page open in Chrome, and I'm interested in finding out at what time I surfed to the page (e.g. yesterday at 12.46).

The reason is that the page shows some statistics, but it doesn't provide a timestamp to go along.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For me, this was useful to later recall the time I started a task after the fact, for tracking time.

One solution:

The page may have been saved in Chrome's cache at the time you loaded it, eg. if that was the first time the page was loaded. So you can check the timestamp on the corresponding file. Open a new tab and type about:cache into the address bar to locate the page by URL. Others have made better cache viewers, search "chrome cache viewer". The actual files are located in %LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache.

Better yet:

Just check the time the page was last loaded using Chrome's History page, if it was enabled and not cleared (Menu > History and recent tabs > History, ctrl+H or about:history).

Better yet:

Apparently there is a Web API that keeps track of various times when processing a page (see this answer, documentation). The following will alert the time when navigation to the web page began (eg. the moment you pressed refresh). Paste this into the address-bar of any open tab:

javascript:alert(new Date(performance.timing.navigationStart).toString())

(Note: Chrome removes any "javascript:" prefix when bookmarklets are pasted into the address-bar to stop people pasting malicious scripts. So, you can type "j" in first, then paste the rest, starting from "avascript:alert...".)

You can save this as a bookmarklet to make access easier.

The following will alert the moments when the page was received fully, and when the page display completed:

javascript:alert(new Date(performance.timing.responseEnd).toString())
javascript:alert(new Date(performance.timing.domComplete).toString())

For the time page took to load: Developer Tools also records precise page load times, under the Network tab. But this requires the ability to first reload the page. There are also related developer profiler extensions for getting page load latencies.

Forensics Wiki has a page on Google Chrome forensics that may also be relevant to this topic.