Google, MySpace promoting a faster Web

Jake Widman
Thursday, 25 June 2009 06:29

Business IT - Technology

As part of Google's "Make the Web Faster" effort, the company has also set up a forum where techniques and tips can be discussed and shared.

MySpace is getting in on the act, too.

The popular social networking site has released its Performance Tracker as an open source project.

Performance Tracker is a browser plugin that helps developers "improve their code performance by capturing and measuring possible bottlenecks on their web pages."

Among other features, the tool measures the memory footprint of Web pages, follows the rendered HTML throughout the page loading, and measures the time it takes to render each part of the page at different connection speeds.

Unfortunately, Performance Tracker only supports Internet Explorer version 6 and later -- but most developers probably use IE to test their sites anyway.

Performance Tracker is available for download here , and the source code is available on Google Code (though, oddly, the tool isn't listed on the Make the Web Faster tools page).