Thursday, October 4th, 2007
YSlow 0.8: Fixing the Firebug Net Panel
I got to spend a little time with Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, and not only is he a really good guy, he has a lot of great experience at getting web sites performing.
I have a full writeup of his talk on Web Performance where he discusses his 14 rules of performing sites, how the frontend web code really matters more than you think, and how the browser cache isn’t helping us out as much as we would like to think.
Steve also just released YSlow 0.8 which has a few new features including one big one:
I discovered that resources (scripts, stylesheets, images) read from the browsers cache (with no HTTP traffic) still show up in Net Panel. This has caused confusion when people thought their cacheable components were not actually being cached by the browser. I talked to Joe Hewitt and settled on a fix that comes with this version of YSlow. The full details are found in the article Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel.
Steve wrote a detailed report on the bug and you can read and download YSlow here.
I took the opportunity to sit down with Steve and find out more:
I thought this was in Firebug 1.1 betas already…?
Thanks … YSlow is very interesting.. I’m currently learning about his 8 rules and doing some experiments .. When I wanna add about YSlow to my firebug tutorial series..
How about improving preformance of YSlow itself?
It completely kills Firefox on OSX (even with Autorun uncheck), the only way to remove the “Beach Balls” is to disable the plugin and restart Firefox. Not ideal. I could live with the slowness if there was a built in “disable YSlow” option that did not require a restart.
You know, I just realized that Firefox has become so popular/ubiquitous/prevalent that we’re now creating Add-ons to other Add-ons. What the hell, eh?
Heh, I wonder if we’ll soon start packing our extensions with other-extension-dependencies like a .deb or .rpm package.
Also, good interview.