Clock Your AJAX Apps and Website Load Time with WebWait

Introduction

Ever wanted to clock your website’s speed? Of course you have. If you’re any sort of Web Developer you’ve used Web Page Analyzer in the past and you’ve probably gotten by with it. There’s a new AJAX tool called WebWait, which does a similar job except much, much cooler. I mean, after all it’s AJAX right?

WebWait is unique is many ways.

• One of the nicest features is that you can set it to perform multiple runs at specified intervals and take an average of all of them.
• It is, of course, browser independent since it doesn’t exactly run on your system.
• It handles cookies and authentication from within your browser. If you log into a page and copy a URL from an authenticated session, then you can track these load times. This is one option that I’ve never seen before.

Why I Still Use Web Page Analyzer

Although there are these cool features of WebWait I still rely on Web Page Analyzer for a lot of things. My first problem is that WebWait does not give an estimated speed.

Why would anybody want an estimated download speed? Because when I design a website I try to keep compatibility in mind. Therefore I would like to know how long it would take some of my 56K modem users are feeling. On my connection, everything seems fast.

Also it doesn’t give any indication of whether or not a site is GZipped or compressed in some other fashion. Sometimes it’s just nice to know. But all in all, it’s a cool new tool and it has its uses.