To be specific, though, browser support goes back to Safari 3.2, FF 1.5, Op 9.5, Netscape 7.2, Mozilla 1.7, and IE6. That should cover most pages’ support matrices.

I am struggling with what to do about my terrible load time on my blog due to external http requests, and this has given me some good ideas.

Has anyone had any experience with the LABjs Solution? Is is compatible with older browsers?

YSlow is a good tool, but you have to be careful of the grades that it reports. Sometimes, the reports don’t answer the WHY- specifically WHY is your webpage running slowly. (Kind of reminds me of the time I got a C on my 3rd grade report card in handwriting, but never understood WHY exactly I got the C.) Souders’ book is a great recommendation!

Great post- enjoyed reading it and checking out the comments.

We have been monitoring our site with Gomez for some time and find that 3rd party .js calls are often the culprits for poor page load time.

More importantly, you cannot always uncover these issues by simply loading the page once or twice. Page load needs to be regularly monitored. We have found several third party js calls that have unreliable load times.

Occasionally, we have removed a tool because it’s load speed was unreliable. At other times, the tool provider has been unaware of the issue and our feedback has led to a fix. Some of these tool providers had a large number of other clients, which suggests a lot of sites do not regularly monitor load times.

With everybody browsing with broadband connection or faster, the speed of the sites will be more important.

There is another great online tool (http://tools.pingdom.com/) I’ve used to understand what takes time when loading our site. It clearly shows which requests are slow or if an image is too large. And you can also see the time between the actual request is sent and the content is received.

/Christian