Site owners and developers who don’t want to give their visitors a "check your email while this page loads" experience may be indebted to Google.  The search giant has released a tool called Page Speed that’s capable of identifying ways to make things run faster. 

Page Speed is a Firefox/Firebug – not Chrome, mind you – add-on that Google’s been using internally for some time.  It conducts tests on Web server configurations and front-end code in order to reach its conclusions, and a post on the Google Code Blog explains, "Page Speed’s suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement."

Those best practices are available in written form if you’re feeling curious and would like to inspect them.  The Webmaster Help Forum is standing by if you’ve got any questions.  Also, since Page Speed is an open source project, real go-getters can contribute to its development.

Google’s Page Speed appears to be in competition with Yahoo’s YSlow, which has been available for years.  It’ll be interesting to see which one comes out on top.

Or you can always try both, of course, since (leaving aside the old joke about blank pages) there’s no such thing as a site that’s too fast.