CLOUDFLARE has released BEACON (Browser Experience Across Cloudflare’s Observed Network), an anonymised dataset intended to show how people experience the web in real-world conditions. It contains billions of performance measurements from 10,000 of the largest websites on Cloudflare’s network, covering major browser engines, devices and countries. The data is updated daily in Google BigQuery and follows standards from the community-led RUM Archive.
It includes full histograms for the three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), allowing researchers to examine performance beyond the usual 75th percentile.
Cloudflare’s initial analysis found that WebKit, the only browser engine currently available on iOS, generally performs best, but is at least 10% worse than Blink-based browsers for LCP, INP or both in 46 countries where it accounts for more than 10% of traffic. In Cambodia, WebKit’s LCP is 50% worse than Blink’s.
The data also suggests that slow loading is more often linked to discovering content and rendering it than downloading the resource itself, while slow interactions are strongly affected by JavaScript execution and complex CSS layout calculations. Soft navigations were two to three times faster than hard navigations, although landing pages remained substantially slower, reaching a P95 LCP of 8,940ms.
Cloudflare says the dataset removes domains and URL paths, aggregates records and discards groups with fewer than five measurements. It is publicly available through Google BigQuery for research and analysis.