A reliable and useful Firefox extension that will help you to quickly analyze a webpage and provides you with suggestions on how to improve the page’s performance.
- YSlow for Firefox
- Version :3.1.8
- License :BSD License
- OS :Windows All
- Publisher :Yahoo
YSlow for Firefox Description
YSlow is a practical, useful and effective Firefox extension that analyzes web pages’ performance by examining all the components presented such as CSS and HTML elements.
By using YSlow you have the possibility to measure the page’s performance and get suggestions on how to improve it. Because it seamlessly integrates within Firefox, it displays statistics about each opened page and summarizes the page’s components.
Before actually using YSlow, you need to install Firebug as well, so you can get access to all features and settings.
The process of gathering data is quite simple and does not interfere with other programs’ functionality. It crawls the DOM (Document Object Model) to find all the components such as images, scripts and styles, grabs information about each component and easily creates a XMLHttpRequest to fetch the component and track its headers and other necessary data.
The last step is that YSlow takes all this information about the page and generates a grade for each rule, which produces the overall grade.
Moreover, YSlow’s web page analysis is based on various performance rules such as minimizing HTTP requests. A simple way that helps you to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page’s design. Although this is not a convenient rule, you can still reduce the number of HTTP requests by using combined files and inline images.
Another rule that might be helpful to improve the webpage performance with minimum effort is to use a content delivery network, simply known as CDN. This rule is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users.
In addition, when analyzing a web page, YSlow deducts points for each infraction of a rule then applies a grade to each rule. For each selected rule, a grade is listed along with a list of components that violated the rule and provides you with further information on how to improve the performance of the selected web page.