One of the most fundamental reasons for Google’s success is the site’s speed — search queries typically take a fraction of a second, and most of the company’s other services are usually very snappy as well (save for Gmail, which occasionally bogs down). Part of this speed can be attributed to the company’s obsession with minimalist design and its vast server farms, but you can be sure there’s no shortage of optimization that’s going on to make sure pages load as quickly as possible on the front end, too.
To help streamline its sites, Google has been using an internal tool called Page Speed, and starting today it’s opening up the tool to the developer community. The newly open-sourced tool is a Firefox plugin that integrates with Firebug, making suggestions on how to speed up your site based on best practices.
From the Google blog post:
For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Yahoo offers a similar tool for Firefox called YSlow, which is also meant to help developers streamline their websites.
Looks just like YSlow! How creative of them.
Yeah, this is exactly like YSlow. Google has to build all of their tools themselves though to prove how smart they are.
well the creator of yslow has been a googler for quite some time now (former yahoo)
Yes, but still – Page Speed is a Copy/Paste tool. Anyway – YSlow has a lot more features and info. I will stick to YSlow
Ya It gives the feeling of that Yslow add-on. Nothing new.
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It would be great to see a side-by-side comparison of which of the two tools (Page Speed and Yslow) actually give better suggestions to speed up pages.
They’re pretty much the same thing. Google’s documentation provides some better examples but I prefer YSlow. The Empty Cache vs. Primed Cache graphs under statistics is a great resource
You will never find analysis like that here on techcrunch. TC definately needs more VC activity info and less misinformed fanboy tech gadget lust. They just don’t have the ability for tech analysis.
Funny that they have a tool speed but not for chrome
Steve Souders, a former Yahoo and creator of YSlow, now works at Google. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a hand in creating this tool.
I’ve looked at the source code and Bryan McQuade is listed in pretty much every file, so I’m assuming he’s the main developer behind the tool. He’s also one of the posters on the google blog.
And, how hard would it be to write a script that replaces ‘Steve Sounders’ with ‘Brayn McQuade’ from each of the source code file?
Yah, because Google is always about trying to deceive at every turn and this is something that is right out of their dirty trick books.
umm…
but isn’t the issue for most complaints about slow site display, due to the f*ing amount of external ads/plugins/apps from other 3rd party systems!!!
if you get rid of these… then don’t most pages load fairly quickly!
This has Steve Souders written all over it.
c++ or c
Just tried it out and it has very helpful suggestions like YSlow.
I wish it would actually provide the CSS file with the removed unused portions because that job usually takes me an forever…v2…hint….hint
You should look at CSS Dust-Me-Selectors http://www.site...ustmeselectors/ It does exactly what you’re looking for.
You should check out CSS Dust-Me Selectors. It does exactly that. http://www.site...ustmeselectors/
FYI, This is EXACTLY Apple’s webkit Inspect speed test, to the T, if you open webkit > show packages, you’ll see apple’s much, much sexier looking one is the same HTML.
Actually the other tabs go further, but Apple & Google must have worked together. Probably long before chrome another such were released.
Not only google optimizes its services and websites to load as quickly as possible but as far as I know, website speed is a factor regarding the google serps. So, there is one more reason for one to optimize his site. Google loves fresh content and fast websites.
Pretty amusing to run this on Google’s blog post announcing the tool (http://tinyurl.com/q5nhfm).
Though the tools are not as extensive or suggestive as this new Page Speed add-on, Chrome has some great tools for page load speed insight.
Ctrl + Shift + J takes you to
chrome://inspector/inspector.html
Also, I suspect there will be more coming with these kinds of tools, see the Google I/O day 1 keynote video (http://www.yout...1F4CEB92D80C4B7) at 21:30 where Vic demo’s an internal monitoring tool they use to see exactly what’s happening on a page when it loads. All built in HTML 5
In the latest dev chrome, that url is actually chrome://devtools/devtools.html and is much more advanced than before I think. Same Ctrl-Shift-J shortcut though.
Hello?
why the page speed is only used on firefox
Try AOL Pagetest for IE, it’s a great tool if you want something IE based
bah, just make firebug for chrome
Well, maybe Google could fix the memory leaks of Firebug.
google knows nothing but copy paste.
So as web developers, should trash Chrome now and go back to FireFox.
This is not a smart move by Google at all.
It is like Yslow…
I have been using this today to optimize my apps. I find it better than yslow. Its less clunky and the information is displayed a lot better.
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