Page Speed Score [Update]

Back in May last year, I wrote a post about a new Firebug (for Firefox) Plug-in called Page Speed, that allowed you to test the load time of your website and get some useful tips on how to improve this.

This week, Google took that idea and extended it into an independent online tool, making it available for anyone on any browser. It uses a version of WebKit installed on a server to run the test (via the Chrome version of Page Speed Im guessing) to test your site and suggest improvements.

It seems to work in exactly the same way, and suggests the same kinds of things to improve your score, and has the same issues I pointed out last time, in that it marks you down for incorrect caching on Google Services you include on your page (Analytics in my case).

When I first ran the test on my site, I had dropped to 76/100, this was down to the javascript includes I had slowing things down, and the image caching wasn’t long enough. A couple of tweaks later and I’m now back up to 96/100 which is 3 above where I got to last year.

Read the Google post or start testing your site, please note tho, that as its being hosted on the Google Labs site, this could (as many have done before) disappear without warning. If it does I’ll update this post to reflect that.

Posted in Google, SEO, Tips n Tricks, Tools of the Trade | 2 Comments »

developing for the mobile web

As more and more people start browsing on their mobiles, ensuring our sites work ok on small screens is going to become more important. Here are a few emulators you can use to test your websites look and work ok.

  • http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html
  • http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/
  • https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=060AD92489947D410D897474079C1477
  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx
  • http://developer.palm.com/

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Posted in Tools of the Trade, Website Design | No Comments »

Firefox 4 Beta has landed

I mentioned last week on Twitter that I had been using the Fx4.0 alpha at home in preparation for the Fx4.0 Test Day (last Friday) and how impressed I was with it. Apart from the extra space saved from removing the title/menu bar the browser felt obviously faster and more stable than previous alpha and even beta releases.

Yesterday Mozilla announced the build has reached BETA and is ready for the more cautious developer to start playing with it. Firefox 4.0 comes with lots of new bells and whistles, you can find a full feature list here, most notable the new UI design and enhancements in <hmtl5> and CSS3. There are also lots of new developer api’s for us to play with including websockets and local indexeddb’s.

If your already surfing the beta channel wave, you should be able to just “upgrade now” although my work machine didn’t find it so had to install it manually. Those of you running a stable realease or want to install manually can do so via the usual beta release channel.

For more information on please read the Mozilla Announcement on their blog.

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Google open a fresh pot

Google last night announced they have completed their migration to their new web indexing system known as ‘Caffeine’.

This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.

Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.

The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!

google caffine comparision

Image copyright of Google

There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine.  But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.

You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog

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Posted in Google, SEO, T'Internet News | No Comments »

Mozilla to skip Fx3.7 and go straight to 4.0

Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner, yesterday announced that Mozilla is to” jump” Fx3.7 and head straight for 4.0.

The main reason for this is because, Fx3.7 consisted primarily of “Out of Process Plugins” which as most of you know has been implemented in Fx3.6.4. This has pushed developers to bypass the 3.7 release and focus on pushing out Firefox 4.0, hopefully by November.

A couple of things that jump out to me are that there will be no more modal dialogs and software updates will switch to background tasks. This is to help improve the user experience as they are two of the main pause points in a using Firefox.

The background process updates I can understand, Chrome has shown that this is by far the best way to push out updates and bug fixes to users and ensure that everybody is running the same version across the board. The removal of modal dialog however Im not too sure about.

There are also the expected updates, the new chrome (browser layout, not Google browser) redesign, which has removed many of the less used parts of the interface as found during a Test Pilot back in March and from developer feedback.

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Firefox 4.0 UI concept - May 2010

Something Im really excited about are the developer tools. In particular the console. Beltzner described it as a Quake style console, pulled from the top of the browser, as an advanced view source. With the ability to edit css/dom elements, and make other tweaks on the fly. They will continue to support Firebug and will also add a couple of other api’s to allow us to access rendering times and memory usage from within our apps with should help a lot with development and optimisation.

If you using Firefox or a modern web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch Mike Beltzner presentation.
It is almost an hour long but I do recommend watching or at least listening, to what Mozilla believe is the future of Firefox and the direction they are going.

For more on this story, head over to Mike Beltzner blog post, view the slides and watch the presentation.

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Posted in Mozilla, Tools of the Trade | No Comments »

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