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April 29, 2009

YSlow Release

One of the most frequent complaints I hear about YSlow grades is, "Some of these performance rules do not apply for my website." Most web developers want to evaluate site performance according to their own specific design and content criteria. For example: Not all sites use content delivery networks (CDNs). With the latest release of YSlow, it becomes really easy for web developers to configure their own rule sets and get relevant grades for their pages. We've also incorporated nine new rules, in addition to the previous thirteen. The ability to create your own rule set for performance testing is a next step towards opening up YSlow for developers to create and share their own rules.

Improving page performance sometimes involves reducing page weight. Images are one of the biggest contributors to page weight for most sites. Our performance rules talk about optimizing images to improve performance. Most often, in-depth knowledge of tools like Photoshop and other design tools is required to publish highly optimized images. We've removed the pain of optimization in this version of YSlow by integrating with Smush.it. Smush.it finds all images on your web page and applies the right techniques to optimize them without visual quality loss. Developers can also download smushed images in a zip format.

The new look is designed to encourage developers to evaluate their webpage performance more closely and pay attention to small details, like making sure they've used small favicons that are cacheable. Our goal is a better, faster web experience for all.

If you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to join the conversation on the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance group. We look forward to your continued interest and enthusiasm – stay tuned, there's still a lot more to come.

Pramod Khincha
Exceptional Performance


Note: You can download this new YSlow release for Firefox here. Thanks to cancel bubble (below) for providing the reminder and the link.

Posted at April 29, 2009 8:01 AM | Permalink

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Comments

A link to actually download/upgrade YSlow 2 would be nice. Here, let me help: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

Posted by: cancel bubble at April 29, 2009 9:17 AM

Jear thx, finally!
--I'm so happy theres the ver. 2 finnaly
Together with the Serveradministration of my Company I worked out a little Apace .htaccess that applys to these Rules of the last version.

So THX from Germany

Posted by: KTB at April 29, 2009 10:08 AM

Just was suprised by my Firefox, updated the plugin and I really, really like the changes. Especially the possibility to edit the rules (the CDN case ^^).

Great Work!

Posted by: Matthias at April 29, 2009 12:23 PM

Looks awesome! Hey, now I can finally get an "A" :)

One note on one of the rules though: I thought there were usability implications if you don't set a width and height on images. I understand the reasoning behind this, so does YSlow actually tested the dimensions of each image against any declared width/height values?

Congrats!

Posted by: Eric Wendelin at April 29, 2009 2:15 PM

Maybe I had read this wrong in previous posts but I thought there was the possibility to edit the rules if you needed to relax or tighten one of the rules.

Posted by: Mark Widner at April 30, 2009 6:46 AM

@Mark Widner: We are working towards making available a public API to write your own rules.

@Eric Wendelin: we check the height and width specified in the tag and compare against the actual image dimensions. We are not recommending not using the height and width but just scale it right.

Posted by: Pramod Khincha at April 30, 2009 12:12 PM

@Pramod:
As I hoped :) Great work!

Posted by: Eric Wendelin at April 30, 2009 2:30 PM

Firefox 无法将文件安装至 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5369/addon-5369-latest.xpi,原因为: 下载错误
-228

This almost a week!

Posted by: Justin at May 1, 2009 10:22 PM

When will YSlow be released for FireFox 3.5 (Beta) ?? .. PLEASE... I really appreciate all the work the YSlow team does!!!

Posted by: DDD at May 2, 2009 1:49 AM

Latest version 2.0.0b3 has issues.
It causes JomSocial user registration to fail.

See http://www.jomsocial.com/forum/index.php?f=3&t=5287&p=29263&rb_v=viewtopic#p29263

Posted by: Henrik Gregersen at May 3, 2009 6:19 AM

@DDD: we are currently looking at FireFox 3.5 Beta to see how we can support YSLOW on the beta release. Please stay tuned!

Posted by: Pramod Khincha at May 7, 2009 8:52 PM

Hi all.
Thanks for the awesome program. It helps a lot.
The only thing that I found is: even if I have an image missing (causing 404) I still get an A on "No 404s".

Again, thanks.

Posted by: Tiago Abreu at May 10, 2009 12:57 AM

Hello,

I am having some problems with the "Compress components with gzip" rule: it reports that some of the js/css files are not compressed (and gives a lower grade), although I am sure they are compressed. When I access those files directly and check response headers via WebDeveloper I see that it has "Content-Encoding: gzip" directive in the header

There are some other (external) js/css files which are not gzipped but I am confused as to why YSlow lists my files which are gzipped. It seems this happens only when browser uses cached version of the resource.

Posted by: Ogi at May 12, 2009 7:56 PM

2.0.0b3 prevented CAPTCHA validation until I unchecked the (default) "Automatically run YSlow when page finishes loading" box in the Options panel.

This may also be the cause for the JomSocial registration issues?

Posted by: Craig at May 16, 2009 4:37 AM

Hello there,

I have a problem:

. I download the ZIP w/ my smush.it folder but it is missing some of them, some 50% of the pics that have had to be smush it.

What is happening?

Posted by: Andre BF at May 17, 2009 2:47 AM

Grade F on Put JavaScript at bottom

There are 11 Javacript scriptss found in the head of the document

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grade F for spelling

You need an 's' in 'Javascript'' and one less in 'scripts'.

Posted by: Nick Tulett at May 18, 2009 5:24 AM

Here are my thoughts on the new version.
Its snazzier and prettier. The ability to control the tests being run is a great features. However where has all the detail gone?

Sure I score 100 A now but I know I don't have far future expiry headers set.
I used to see things like these objects are not at the bottom of the page.
Now It says its ok there are only 2 inline scripts. Ok so its good now but I would still like the level of detail showing me the name of the inline scripts etc.

I used YSlow quite extensively before and now it just feels like a marketing tool. I'm happy its pretty but you have to give the level of detail you did before. This is a great development tool not a "Rank my site" tool.

Posted by: Gary at May 29, 2009 2:15 AM

When O when is Firefox 3.5 support comming?

P.s. love YSlow

Posted by: Tim Rutter at June 2, 2009 7:21 PM

And for Opera? :(

Posted by: Raul S. at June 7, 2009 5:54 PM

Any word on YSlow for Firefox 3.5? RC2 is out so the final will be here soon.

Posted by: James at June 25, 2009 3:25 AM

Where is the YSlow update compatible with FF 3.5 ??

Posted by: tom at June 29, 2009 9:16 AM

Well FF 3.5 is final and released....when is support coming?

Posted by: Brandon Schenz at June 30, 2009 10:26 AM

YSlow doesn't work in FF3.5, but the latest PageSpeed beta does!
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html

Posted by: Richard at June 30, 2009 11:05 AM

Do you have any plan to support for Firefox 3.5?

Thanks,
Minh

Posted by: Tran Duc Minh at July 4, 2009 5:49 AM

I'm waiting for Y!Slow for FF3.5..:D

Posted by: Mick Genie at July 4, 2009 7:04 AM

Please check the Mozilla Addons site for the latest YSlow which works with FF3.5:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369

Posted by: Brian Cantoni at July 9, 2009 9:16 PM

When you go to the "Put JavaScript at bottom" Tab (I guess that's called a tab, even though its on the side, idk?) in the "Grade" Tab, there is a typo, it currently says "There are # Javacript scriptss found in the head of the document" when it should say "There are # Javascript scripts found in the head of the document", this is not a big thing, its just something you might want to fix. ;-Þ

Posted by: John Rucker at July 14, 2009 4:49 PM

Typical Yahoo! response... still can't use ySlow with FF3.5.1!

Anyway, Google released a similar add-on, Page Speed. Its compatible with FF3.5.1 and way way much better. Give it a try people!

Posted by: Enrique at July 28, 2009 7:00 PM

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