Browserscope & SpriteMe

Google Tech Talk September 17, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Lindsey Simon and Steve Souders. This talk covers two open source projects being released by Googlers. Browserscope (http://browserscope.org/) is a community-driven project for profiling web browsers. The goals are to foster innovation by tracking browser functionality and to be a resource for web developers. The current test categories include network performance, Acid 3, selectors API, and rich text edit mode. SpriteMe (http://spriteme.org/) makes it easy to create CSS sprites. It finds background images in the current page, groups images into sprites, generates the sprite image, recomputes CSS background-positions, and injects the sprite into the current page for immediate visual verification. SpriteMe changes the timeline of sprite development from hours to minutes. Lindsey Simon is a Front-End Developer for Googles User Experience team. Simon hails from Austin, TX where he slaved at a few startups, taught computing at the Griffin School, and was the webmaster for many years at the Austin Chronicle. He currently lives in San Francisco and runs a foodie website dishola.com. Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O'Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University. The video of this talk will be posted as part of the Web Exponents speaker series ( http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-e-x-ponents.html )