Although I sometimes refer to Google as the Soprano’s of the Internet, today they offered up a giant neighborhood feast for all of us peons.
Google’s Page Speed is a fantastic app that should be in every developers toolbox. Until today, we had to rely on Yahoo’s YSlow to try to make better decisions about how to optimize our pages. YSlow was good when it was our only option, but now compared to Page Speed it just looks like a half-finished firebug addon.
One of my favorite metrics reveals your css optimization. It tells you how many of your css rules are to broad or too narrow and shows you which ones they are. That alone could probably save some of us 30%-40% of our css declarations.
There is also a second tab installed which allows you to watch what’s happening in real time. Page Speed Activity lets you see what http requests are being fulfilled and how long all of that is taking. That part is nice to have in real-time, but I was okay with the “net” tab in Firebug, and probably still will use that just as often.
I admit I’m a sucker for measurable metrics like this. I wasn’t impressed by Google’s latest boxed search, but this little gem is a keeper.
If you want to make faster loading pages, and who doesn’t, you need to go install this asap.
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