Blaze.io launches WPT with mobile devices

February 10, 2011 10:53 am | 2 Comments

About 30 minutes ago Blaze.io launched the Blaze Mobile Performance Tool. This is incredibly exciting. I’ve only played with it a little bit but I wanted to blog about it ASAP to make people aware. Note that the service might get overrun today and tomorrow – so be patient and come back later if you have to.

Everyone reading this hopefully knows about WebPagetest. I consider WebPagetest to be one of the most important performance tools released – ever. Pat Meenan has done an amazing amount of work on it. The reason I think it’s so important is it dramatically lowers the bar for doing performance analysis. You don’t need to install a plugin or exe – all you need is a browser. It’s no coincidence that over a dozen companies including Aptimize, Strangeloop Networks, and Catchpoint have volunteered to host instances of WebPagetest in locations across the globe. Being able to get an HTTP waterfall chart, a Page Speed report, connection info, and screenshots all from one tool is powerful.

Building on the WebPagetest framework, the folks at Blaze.io cracked open some iPhones and Androids and hooked them up. This is a first version so not every feature is available, and my Android tests showed a few quirks that need to be investigated, but this is a great first step.

As shown in the screenshot above, you can see a picture of the site you tested and play a video of that site loading. Clicking on the waterfall chart shows a large version. Right now this doesn’t have a detailed breakdown (DNS, connect, wait, download, etc.). The test I did using their Android device had some resources showing a “1 ms” download time – obviously an issue to investigate. The page size seems larger than expected – I’m assuming this is uncompressed size versus the actual bytes transferred.

I’m sure they have a long todo list. I’d like to see integration with Page Speed. They have a link to view the HAR file. The provided link goes directly to Honza‘s online HAR Viewer. With a little wrangling I was able to download the HAR file to disk and upload it to my HAR to Page Speed tool to get a Page Speed report. More devices would be a huge win.

I’m doing a workshop next week at Webstock on mobile performance tools. I’m so psyched to have another one to show off. Great work Blaze.io!