05 June 2009, 08:45

Google opens up PageSpeed

Page Speed's network activity view Google has released Page Speed, an extension to Firebug for Firefox, as open source. Page Speed has been used internally by Google to analyse web site page performance from within the browser, using Google's Web Performance Best Practices to recommend changes that could be made to improve page performance.

Page Speed is Google's answer to Yahoo's YSlow, an MPL licensed Firebug extension which uses Yahoo's best practice rules. Apart from being released under the Apache 2.0 license and using different rules, Page Speed also has a number of features to make page optimisation easier that YSlow does not, such as an automatic "minifier" for JavaScript code, an image optimiser and detection of which JavaScript code can be lazily loaded. It also incorporates an improved network/browser activity display that gives more details than Firebug's Net view.

Page Speed is available for Firefox on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP, and requires Firefox 3.0.4 and Firebug 1.3.3 or higher official non-beta versions. Developers interested in the source code should go to the Page Speed project page.

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