On 05/21/2010 03:39 PM, Roan Kattouw wrote:
I'm not sure we need this. I don't see a reason why one of us usability developers can't just load pages, find out whether they're slower, and where the slowness is. If the slowness is present for everyone (many different people reporting slowness seems to indicate that, and I have no reason to believe otherwise) you don't need to jump through hoops to gather data from random users when you can easily reproduce it yourself.
I'm not sure you need it either; I just thought I'd offer what I had on hand. But the reason we built it was to quantify the problem so we could narrow down and prioritize issues.
There are a lot of variables in browser performance, and we found it frustrating to try to simulate various user conditions (OS versions, browser versions, physical location, bandwidth) and get solid, statistically valid measurements that we thought correlated well with what people were actually experiencing. After enough futzing with that, it was a relief to get some actual numbers rolling in automatically.
Last I heard they were going to set it up to graph aggregate client-side performance over time, so that they could easily see if their normal feature changes had unexpected browser performance impact. They want to solve the problems before users complain. So few of them do, especially about something subtle like performance.
William