google chrome - Website response time :Difference between "load" and "finish" ,

Question

I have to check google response time using chrome devtools network for that purpose I loaded a webpage and opened the network tab to check the response time of certain websites for example for this website

I see there are two time quantities 1st one is the "finish" and the second one is "load", finish is I guess the time taken to load the whole page with all the resources including delays, what is this "load"? at first I thought if I add all these times together would add up as "load" but this isn't true, what would be considered the response time of this website, "load" or "finish"?

Answer 1

It seems this 'Finished' time in Chrome devtools includes the asynchronously loading(non blocking) objects/elements on the page which may continue downloading way after the onload event for page has fired.

The response time for a website generally speaking means 'Load' time because that is more easily user perceivable, at this point user can see browser has finished working and page is ready on their screen. Finish time, although technically also a response time doesn't have as much end-user implication.

In some cases it seems the Finish timer never stops and continues increasing so it may not be the best assessment of web page response time.