Google open sources Page Speed

BANGALORE, INDIA: Google has announced the another extension for the popular open source web browser Mozilla Firefox.

Named as Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on enable webmasters and web developers to evaluate the performance of the web pages and can get suggestions on how to improve.

"At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user's experience and helps them become more productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we've used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page Speed," said Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team in a blog post.

Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team said, "Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages, it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug. When you run Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve their speed."

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.

Page Speed's suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement.