YSlow for Opera, Out Now!

For a long time, YSlow has been popular as an effective tool for measuring website performance and highlighting areas for improvement. Previously not available to Opera users, we're pleased to say that all changes as of this week. We've worked with Marcel Duran from the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team to create YSlow as an Opera extension.

It all started back in June, when a mobile version of YSlow was released in the form of a bookmarklet. As you probably know, a bookmarklet is simply a chunk of JavaScript code that is executed from within a browser's address bar or bookmark link. This makes it relatively straightforward to convert YSlow, or indeed most bookmarklets, into an Opera extension. The main change is the addition of a toolbar button and a config.xml settings file.

Next steps? Here's how to use it right now to see how your website could be made faster.

<ol><li>Using Opera for desktop, install the extension from the
Opera extensions sites.</li><li>Visit the website you'd like to measure the performance of.</li><li>Click the YSlow icon in your toolbar, then click the "Run Test" button.</li></ol>
For more details on how to implement some of the resulting suggestions, please head to the YSlow website.