Jumping into code development is Yahoo! and here’s an interesting release from them - YSlow. It’s a Firefox add-on that uses the Firebug extension to check, based on several criteria, how slow a page loads.

It adds a YSlow tab to Firebug that shows different information about the page. You can check the performance (which shows a grade based on the criteria), stats (which show cache and cookie consumption), components (which shows CSS images and content images), and a few tools. The button nests on the status bar for access.

By experience a lot of pages would surely score low with this one. My personal site got an F. LifeSpy got a grade of F. Lifehacker got an F. Digg also got an F. F-grade slowness all around!

Here’s what’s interesting. Yahoo!’s homepage scores a 97 (A) and Google’s search page scores a 96 (A). But Google’s search page is a mere 14Kb as opposed to Yahoo!’s 106.6Kb. How come, YSlow doesn’t consider size as a large factor. Bias, anyone?