Google has released PageSpeed Insights 2.0 with an interface redesign, extensions for Chrome and Firefox, automatic page optimizations with an online service or via SDK, an API, support for mobile devices and more analysis rules.
Google has announced the second version of their open source web page analysis tool now called PageSpeed Insights. Besides using extensions for Chrome and Firefox [XPI], pages can be analyzed for optimization with an online tool at PageSpeed Insights Online. Furthermore, pages and their resources can be automatically optimized with the online PageSpeed Service (beta) or using the Optimization SDK, a set of C++ libraries providing the same optimizations as the service. Another solution is to use the Apache mod_pagespeed module.
When using the service, the optimized pages and their resources are cached on Google’s servers and are served from there. The service cannot be employed for private web pages, such as internal corporate ones, or pages that need user credentials in order to be accessed. The solution for such cases remains the browser extension. The service and the browser extensions come with different rendering engine and user agents resulting in slightly different page score.
PageSpeed also comes with an API providing the same page performance analysis capability as the browser extensions mentioned. The API can be called via CURL, JavaScript, .NET, Go, Java, and several other languages.
The user interface of PageSpeed Insights 2.0 has been redesigned to match that of the online version, and provides an overall score when analyzing a page. The score is meant to indicate how fast a page can be. The lower the score the higher number of improvements that can be applied to the page to make it faster.
PageSpeed can be used to analyze the performance of web pages on mobile devices by using the same rendering engine found in such devices and by altering the optimization recommendations based on mobile characteristics such as lower network and CPU speed compared to desktop systems. Page analysis can now be done remotely through remote debugging.
The page analysis rules have been extended from 20 rules in 2009 when PageSpeed was open sourced to 31.