Julian Castaneda » Firefox

Firefox 3.5 Released

Julian — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:30:12 +0000

A new version of Firefox has been released today. What was slated to be version 3.1 became a more major release that include many important improvements and features. The more important features that are worth nothing are privacy browsing and JavaScript speed improvements. The firefox team claims that version 3.5 javascript engine is twice as fast as version 3.0 and 10 times fater than version 2.

If you are a developer/user that depend on many firefox plug-ins (firebug, yslow, etc..) remember that some of these add-ons will not work until the respective developers update the code to work with the new firefox version.

Need For Speed? Google’s Page Speed

Julian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:51:49 +0000

Google recently release the competition to Yahoo’s YSlow. The Firefox add-on to test and analyze your website speed and performance. I have been using YSlow for quite some time. It has helped me optimized my websites dramatically. Well, now google has entered the market with a similar tool called Page Speed. Page speed consists of two parts, page speed activity and page speed.

The Page Speed tab is a summary of the performance. It gives a detailed report with it’s respective grade. With this report you can see the areas that are in need of optimization. It covers the following topics:

Enable gzip compression
Combine external JavaScript
Leverage browser caching
Minify JavaScript
Optimize images
Optimize the order of styles and scripts
Remove unused CSS
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Use efficient CSS selectors
Minimize DNS lookups
Leverage proxy caching
Combine external CSS
Specify image dimensions
Minimize redirects
Minimize cookie size
Serve resources from a consistent URL
Avoid CSS expressions
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Put CSS in the document head

The Speed Test Activity tab is a cool little feature that shows you in real time the activity of the website in a timeline view. So as the website loads you get a nice view of all the files being loaded and it provides you with a first inside look at some of the possible causes of speed problems in your website.

So if you feel the Need for Speed on your web applications and you might want to save bandwidth I would definetly recomend this tool. I personally have both tools installed (YSlow and Speed Test) so check them out and let me know your thoughts on it.

Note: Firefox required to use any of these tools.

Download Google’s Speed Test
Download Yahoo’s YSlow

Javascript Library Detector

Julian — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:44:52 +0000

If you are like me, and you love to look under the hood of every interesting website you visit. You are going to like this Firefox add-on I stumbled upon today. The JavaScript Library Detector is simple and straight forward. It places in the status bar a favicon of each of the libraries the website you are currently viewing has. Placing the mouse over each icon brings up a little pop-up with the name of the library and the version it uses.

So if you are a web developer you should definitely check it out, you will start to see that some of your favorite sites are already using js libraries such as: jquery, dojo, and prototype.

Download: Library Detector