Just a quick post to get me started at blogging again.

Over the last year (wow, time flies by!) I’ve been working at Canonical, as part of the Landscape team. This is a very diverse team with lots of different skills, and somehow I found myself naturally gravitating towards working more closely on frontend-related issues, of which I could highlight writing YUI3 widgets, speeding up page loading experience and creating a nice testing infrastructure. There’s a ton of things I could write about that, and I really plan to. But today’s entry will be pretty short.

As part of a brain-break task I fixed some of our Javascript tests today so that they would run on Google Chrome. We haven’t been targeting Chrome so far, but that might change soon, driven by Google Analytics stats of people using Landscape.

But, the thing that really caught my attention was the difference in speed between Chrome and Firefox.

For comparison:

Google Chrome 5.0.307.7 beta

$ BROWSER=google-chrome ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 1.020 seconds.
Running:

Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 9.545 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.366 seconds.

Firefox 3.6.3pre

$ BROWSER=firefox ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
  Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 1.014 seconds.
  Running:
                                                                                                                             
  Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 15.032 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
  Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.349 seconds.

Firefox 3.7a3pre

$ BROWSER=firefox-3.7 ./bin/test -1vpc --layer=JsTestDriverLayer
Running tests at level 1
Running canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer tests:
  Set up canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.804 seconds.
  Running:
                                                                                                                           
  Ran 318 tests with 0 failures and 0 errors in 13.433 seconds.
Tearing down left over layers:
  Tear down canonical.testing.javascript.JsTestDriverLayer in 0.379 seconds.

Disclaimer: Both instances of Firefox were started with the “-safe-mode” flag, which disables all plugins and extensions. Also, as they say around here at Canonical: NOT A METRIC. But interesting still.

If you look closely at this post you might find some hints about things we’ve been working on and which I hope to write about, in addition to general tips and tricks about page speed optimization from experiences in both Landscape and Launchpad.