Google's answer to Yahoo’s YSlow

You cannot hold them back for long. Recently Google announced a new open source plug-in for Firefox called Page Speed which can be used to assess the performance of web pages and make recommendations on speeding up the delivery which sounded a lot like Yslow to me. I couldn't wait & got it test on the Citibank's homepage.

Below is the comparison between the tools (YSlow on the right)


For each rule, Page Speed gives you a general indication of how well you’re doing, in the form of a green tick (good), red circle (bad), or amber triangle. You can also hover over a rule to see your percentage score. Page Speed does not provide an overall percentage score, but it does arrange the results in order of importance.

For me the major differences that stood out were:

• PageSpeed focuses a lot on CSS which YSlow doesnt. It'll tell you which CSS rules aren't being used by the current page, and identify some potentially overly-specific CSS selectors

• It not only tells the percentage of savings done through minifying JS and how much overhead you can save, but also provides a direct link to a already minified version of the file which you can simply save over your current file

• It also provide you with optimized images & the savings done by it (saving your time on using other tools like smush.it)
  

• The Page Speed Activity feature lets you monitor real time browser activity such as network latency, DNS lookups, connection establishment, and JavaScript processing.
• One thing found missing was to give some overall grade to assess your pages overall performance as YSlow does.
• YSlow 2.0 gives you the flexibility to customize the rules that are applied. There are 3 default rulesets YSlow (v2), Classic, and Small Site or Blog. The Classic ruleset provides 13 rules while version 2 has added 9 additional rules.

Overall Page Speed adds a new dimension to building better web apps and wouldn't mind it using it after I am finished with YSlow.

....Well I am still pondering over why Google hasn't made this a Chrome plug-in rather.