Here are ideas I hope to get to someday. If you'd like to work on them, please do! It'd be great if you let me know.

Performance Reports

YSlow was built to generate a pithy, quantified performance summary. This project entails generating a prose version of YSlow's output. It would be a 5-10 page printout with sentences and paragraphs, including explanations of the performance fixes and estimates of the expected speedups. Website Grader has a similar example for SEO grading.

DOM tab in Firebug Lite

Firebug Lite provides Firebug's console logging capabilities in Internet Explorer. Another useful piece of Firebug's functionality to have would be the DOM tab. This wouldn't be too hard. Walking the DOM in IE is possible. It would be desirable to maintain the look-and-feel of Firebug, and also to do this with minimal changes to the source code.

Widget Performance Review

Widgets are the future. Pulling in content from disparate sources is already popular (My Yahoo!, iGoogle), and will become more important as the number of intriguing web sites continues to grow. Unfortunately, integrating multiple pieces of third party content in a single page presents a tremendous performance challenge. This project involves conducting a survey of how gadgets are currently done in Facebook, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, Meebo, iTunes, etc. From this survey a set of recommended best practices is put forth.

Suggested Improvements for Browsers and Servers

The need for some performance best practices could be eliminated if browser and server developers changed the default behavior of their products. If browsers supported more than two connections per hostname it would be less critical to reduce the number of HTTP requests for scripts. If Apache and IIS compressed scripts and stylesheets by default, developers wouldn't have to worry about that. The list of suggestions for browser and server developers needs to be compiled and evangelized.