I'm diving into performance tools that are shipped with Google Chrome as I'm trying to get my head around performance improvements techniques. I'm playing around with Timeline tab, and I found that on my page First Paint event is happening before DOMContentLoaded event. I read a few articles and reportedly the first moment when browser can start displaying stuff to the user must be after DOMContentLoaded. Could somebody please explain it this is true?
DOMContentLoaded means that the parser has completed converting the HTML into DOM nodes and executed any synchronous scripts.
That does not preclude the browser from rendering an incomplete DOM/CSSOM tree. In fact it has to be able to perform reflows anyway in case javascript queries computed CSS properties. And if it can do reflows on incomplete trees it may as well render them.
This is also relevant for large documents streamed from a server. The user can already start reading it before it has completed loading.
It is important to understand that the whole parsing / evaluation / rendering process is a stream processing pipeline with some parts even done in parallel / speculatively. The later stages of the pipeline do not wait for the earlier stages to finish, instead they take the outputs as they arrive and process them as soon as enough information is available to do the next increment.
E.g. the parser obviously cannot emit Element nodes before processing all of its attributes, but it can emit the node while still processing its child tree. And the renderer may render the node without its children. And it may be rendered with incomplete styles only to undergo a reflow later, e.g. when javascript inserts another style sheet or simply because the child nodes which have yet to be inserted affect how it will be rendered.
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/#The_main_flow
It's important to understand that this is a gradual process. For better user experience, the rendering engine will try to display contents on the screen as soon as possible. It will not wait until all HTML is parsed before starting to build and layout the render tree. Parts of the content will be parsed and displayed, while the process continues with the rest of the contents that keeps coming from the network.
Historically (at least in firefox) there used to be an initial paint delay during which the page was not rendered until it either was ready or the delay timer expired. The default setting for that delay was lowered repeatedly over the years until it reached 5ms which is less than the refresh rate interval on many monitors (16ms on 60Hz displays).
This behavior may have lead to the inaccurate impression that pages are only rendered on DOMContentLoaded, but even back then a user would still have seen a partial page render on a sufficiently slow page.