Yahoo! Announces YSlow, Firebug based performance tool
This. Is. Brilliant.via ajaxian:
Steve Souders, performance architect at Yahoo!, announced today the public release of YSlow.
Stoyan Stefanov reviewed it briefly and gave tips for custom scoring at his blog.
What’s YSlow?
It’s an extension to Firebug (yes, correct, Firebug, not Firefox) that helps with performance optimization efforts. It scores your page on the scale A to F, based on compliance with Yahoo’s performance rules. It’s a tool that has been used internally at Yahoo and is now released to the world.
Steve is going to be speaking about YSlow at the Ajax Experience that just kicked off. I am looking forward to meeting him and check out the tool. We should give it a run on your sites and post how you did (don’t run it on Ajaxian ;).
This was interesting for me - just because every site I ran this against received a big giant F. Except for Yahoo!
Interesting.
Well, the way I see it, Yahoo spent a lot of time figuring out what makes a page fast or slow and put those practices into play across its network. Only later did they write this plugin as a tool to test against those practices, so yeah, it’s no surprise that they do well in this test. That’s not to say that the rules aren’t valid, nor are they concrete; certainly there are times when it makes sense to do things other than what they recommend.
I’ll say this though, their home page sure as hell loads a lot faster than ours (CNET’s).