Google just released Page Speed, their competitor to Yahoo! YSlow. Both plug-ins for Firebug. Obvious requirements include Mozilla Firefox and Firebug plug-in.

So far it's been pretty to look at. There's 2 tabs instead of YSlow's 1 tab. You can also Record Activity and measure page loading speed as well.

The one thing I do not like right now is that Page Speed creates 2 folders in my home directory on the Mac OSX. I'm not sure where the folders go in Windows systems yet. These folders just hold some cached items when you run the Page Speed to analyze performance.

Google's Page Speed results are a bit different than Yahoo! YSlow. YSlow gives you "grades" and Page Speed just gives you green, red, or yellow signs. It also gives you an explanation of what you can do to make your pages load faster. Page Speed also does not give you the little icon next to Firebug that tells you how long it took to load the initial page. Something I actually like to know even if I'm not performance tuning my own website.

So far, Page Speed is a welcomed addition to the Firebug arsenal. Also check out SitePoint's CodeBurner Firebug plug-in. It's a great little reference for HTML and CSS. And Robert Nyman's FireFinder for Firebug is handy search for Firebug.

What are your thoughts on Google Page Speed? Are you using both Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed?

Introducing Page Speed - Google Code Blog