Utilities

Google introduced a new weapon in its mission to make the web faster: a Chrome extension called Speed Tracer. It helps pinpoint the reasons why slow-loading web apps are so sluggish. Speed Tracer is part of Google Web Toolkit, a suite of tools for web developers that Google uses to make its own apps faster.

Speed Tracer charts the speed of your web app on a graph, where a score close to zero on the Y-axis means your app is lightning fast, and a score near 100 means it’s slow as molasses. Then, you can use Speed Tracer to peek under the covers and see what’s slowing your app down. According to Google, it can analyze “JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more.”

As web apps become more prominent, tools like Speed Tracer become more important for speeding up the web. It only makes sense that Google would launch something like this, since speed seems to be its pet cause lately. Just in the past month or so, we’ve covered page speed as part of search rankings, Google’s Page Speed tools, and Google’s new SPDY protocol that might one day replace HTTP.