Introducing Page Speed mobile analysis, on Google Chrome for Android

March 08, 2012


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Matthew
Libo

By Libo Song and Matthew Hillyard, Software Engineers

Nearly a year ago, we launched Page Speed for Chrome, which has enabled Chrome users to get Page Speed performance suggestions to make their desktop sites faster. Today, we are releasing an update to Page Speed for Chrome that supports mobile Page Speed analysis via Chrome for Android. With Page Speed for Chrome and Chrome for Android, you can perform Page Speed analysis on the mobile version of your web pages, as they are loaded in the Chrome for Android mobile browser.

Many web sites serve mobile-specific versions of their pages. Often, the mobile pages have very different Page Speed scores and Page Speed reports from their desktop counterparts. Page Speed on Chrome for Android makes it easy to analyze both the desktop and mobile versions of your web pages, so you can be sure that your pages load faster for the users of both your desktop and mobile sites.

When analyzing the mobile version of pages, Page Speed for Chrome tunes its analysis to reflect the unique performance characteristics of mobile devices and networks, suggesting the optimizations that will have the biggest impact on reducing load times for your mobile users. Using the powerful Chrome Developer Tools Extension APIs, Page Speed for Chrome can identify renderer performance optimizations that are especially relevant on mobile, such as removing unnecessary reflows and finding long-running scripts that slow down your pages. Page Speed for Chrome will also automatically minify and optimize your HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and image files and make them available for you to download, so you can easily deploy them on your web server.

To get started using Page Speed on Chrome for Android:
  • Follow the instructions to install the Page Speed for Chrome extension on your desktop Chrome browser.
  • Enable remote debugging in Chrome running on your Android device.
  • Navigate to the remote Chrome Developer Tools page in your desktop browser (localhost:9222) .
  • Select one of the Chrome tabs running on your Android device.
In addition to the full Chrome Developer Tools, you will see Page Speed in the Developer Tools panel. Click the Page Speed icon to switch to the Page Speed tab, then click Run Page Speed to generate mobile Page Speed suggestions for the web page that’s loaded on your Android device.


Page Speed screen shot

We hope you’ll give Page Speed for Chrome on Android a try. Please send us feedback via our discussion list and let us know what features you’d like to see us to add next. You may also be interested in watching our recent Google I/O talk on Page Speed performance best practices for mobile web sites.


Libo Song is a software engineer at Google Boston working on the Page Speed team to make the web faster.

Matthew Hillyard worked on the Page Speed team as an intern. He has since graduated with a Master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and currently is a software engineer on the Google+ team.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor