The WebKit team just announced the latest round of updates to the already robust WebKit Inspector, and there are a couple of new features that deserve mention:
- Timeline Panel: Like dynaTrace AJAX Edition, WebKit Inspector now provides a graphical timeline which overlays network operations, script execution, and rendering on the same view. Like dynaTrace’s PurePath feature, WebKit Inspector tracks the causal relationship between events and browser operations, so you will always know the cost of a specific user action.
With the ever increasing complexity of web applications, this is of great benefit to developers. We can now see the full performance of the application from the network through to final rendering to the screen with enough granularity of detail to take action against bottlenecks.
- Audit Panel: Providing functionality similar to YSlow and PageSpeed, the Audit Panel is a rules engine which currently provides recommendations on network and client side performance optimizations.
The team plans to open this framework so developers can contribute new rules in different categories. It would be great to see some degree of standardization so that an interested developer could easily write new rules to be executed in YSlow, PageSpeed, and WebKit Inspector.
