YSlow update – offers more complete picture

Yahoo! released version 0.9 of YSlow recently. The release notes offer the highlights, but this blog entry by one of the developers provides more details.

I haven’t had a chance to spend much time with the new release, but it promises to address what I saw as the biggest shortcoming of prior releases – that it only crawled the DOM and didn’t capture network traffic. The new version promises to do both, providing a much more complete picture.

I was a bit disappointed to see that a bug I had reported in prior versions still remains – YSlow falsely identifies redirects. For example, today on www.aol.com there are 3 redirects, but YSlow identified 20 – the other 17 are listed as “redirects to <blank>” .

Nevertheless, a great tool.

The Mobile Web … not ready for prime time

I’ve been using a BlackBerry 8800 for a few months now. Mainly for access to my company’s e-mail and calendar, but also for IM and Web access. This is the first BlackBerry, or Smartphone for that matter, I’ve used, and I must say that I’m sold.

Having a mobile Web browser with me all the time, I find myself trying to look up movie reviews while I’m browsing videos at Blockbuster. Or trying to do a price comparison for something I see at a local retail store. Or trying to find (and reserve) a book at my local library, that someone just recommended in a conversation. I don’t want to wait until I get back to a computer to do these things, I want to do them in real-time, from where I am.

Notice I said “trying” in each case above. Nearly every time I try something like this, I come away frustrated and disappointed because the Web sites are barely usable (and sometimes not at all) on a mobile device.

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