jmoiron.net

After a year or two of incremental updates to gmail and youtube and general software announcements or releases that were not very exciting to me; notably mondrian and app-engine, google has released a torrent of interesting software in the past week that look fairly exciting to me!

The first thing to come across my radar was Google Page Speed, a Firefox+Firebug plugin that examines a page for potential improvements in load times. My 10 minute test ride at work showed that it had a much more extensive and helpful checklist of best practices than YSlow, which tends to moan about the last 10% of what you need (separate media to a cookie-less domain, use akamai, etc) but doesn't really help for day-to-day development. Page slow also did a lot more technical lifting, like telling you what styles were not in use on a page, or detecting that you are re-sizing images with html size attributes and telling you how much you could save by serving an appropriately sized thumbnail. Probably the most useful is the timing view, which breaks down resource loads into connecting, connection established, waiting for data, transfering, etc phases, and even tracks the execution of client javascript. Not exactly a profiler, but very nice for a high level look to identify any areas that might look suspicious!

Along with page speed's documentation, Google has also released a very concise listing of web performance best practices which is probably a handy link to give to any new team member joining a web development shop that might not have a recent web background. Like most google documentation (which is underrated, I think) it reads very well but remains very technical.

The release of a branded linux version of the browser Google Chrome has finally arrived in the form of a dev channel version. Although linux support is still in its early stages, it is very nice to be getting a quality competitor to Firefox with a different javascript engine based on webkit. As of yet plugins do not work, which means no Java (vpn access) and no flash. I've used the linux dev channel version for a little over 3 days now and the only other things I've noticed is that HTTP Auth doesn't seem to work and the web developer tools also seem to be broken. Chrome seems to take almost an order of magnitude less ram than Firefox (although it is not like-for-like w/o the massive java/flash plugins loaded), and also starts up so fast it made me realize I developed a habit of looking around the room as I wait for Firefox to start.

Google also announced that they would be supporting Mercurial repositories in google code. This makes google code and bitbucket attractive destinations for code that I might wish to contribute to the community in a more active way, as creating branches on hosted sites seems to give more visibility.

Finally, Google has released something I've been waiting for for a long time: the Android scripting environment, which allows you to write programs for any android phone in Python, Lua, or a JRE-based scripting language called BeanShell that google forked back in 2007. With this and the release of the non-android Palm Pre this past saturday, suddenly my next phone selection got very interesting! If Android handset makers could get their act together, they might have a very compelling product for the very niche libre geek!