What are the most useful features in a third party plug-in performance tool?

[cliffcrosland]

We are a group of Stanford students hoping to build a tool that measures third-party plug-in performance. A mocked-up prototype of the tool can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/~cliftonc/cgi-bin/

It's becoming more and more popular for publishers of prominent sites, such as Mashable and many media sites, to include third party web apps--for example, the Facebook "Like" button, or the Meebo Bar.

But it can often be difficult for publishers to tell how the third party code is effecting the performance of their site. Is the third party code slowing down their pages load time? Is it blocking the rendering of the page? Is it making too many asynchronous requests?

If anyone has any knowledge in this space--about what the pain points of a publisher using third party code are, about what features you would really like to see, or about what you like or dislike in this very early mockup, please let us know! We hope to build something useful for everyone.

[vsmash]

Two of the more prominent problems are:
1. Slowed down page load
2. Not working properly on https pages due to third party referencing non-encrypted or lower level encrypted stuff (even if the thirdparty script is served via https) - eg:facebook like.

[cliffcrosland]

Two of the more prominent problems are: 1. Slowed down page load 2. Not working properly on https pages due to third party referencing non-encrypted or lower level encrypted stuff (even if the thirdparty script is served via https) - eg:facebook like.

Thank you very much for your feedback. We hadn't considered the problems that arise when using plug-ins that reference resources with lower level encryption. Are there any specific plug-ins that suffer from this problem that you think we should look at?

[vsmash]

facebook 'like' button.
Had to remove it from a PCI compliant site because the lower level encryption from facebook was causing embarrasing security popups.
Reference PCI DSS for credit card security standards.

[cliffcrosland]

facebook 'like' button. Had to remove it from a PCI compliant site because the lower level encryption from facebook was causing embarrasing security popups. Reference PCI DSS for credit card security standards.

This is really interesting information. Thank you very much. Our plug-in analysis tool was initially envisioned to measure performance only, but I think analyzing security by detecting lower level encryption would be very helpful to web devs. If you have other ideas for what might be useful to web devs, please let us know.

In a few weeks, we should have a functioning prototype up and running. Would you be interested in receiving a link once we've built it and trying it out?

[vsmash]

Yes please that would be very interesting.

[Roy Murphy]

Very interesting prototype!
I'd be interested how my prototype plugin performs in terms of speed?

http://jampax.org/apps/contact/index.html

Jambox is a new modal dialog plugin for the fast development of my Jampax JavaScript Library, and I'd be very interested how this compares with the others in terms of calls, requests, total size and speed.
I've taken lots of care to ensure it's as fast and as lightweight as I can make possible. It's still a work in progress and have lots of useful web development apps to build upon it, but things are looking good so far.

[Roy Murphy]

Just as an addition to my last post, for me there are two main thorns in my side which are integral to most of my sites.

The issue as always is speed (page loading times), requests (number of), plugin or snippet location within the page call (header code or body code), compression (minified javascript or compressed or gzipped images, files etc.) and lastly, users browser cacheability.

If a plugin is used on many pages within a site, just an initial JavaScript call can be requested only once and held within the browser cache for faster recall.
These plugins should come with documentation and predefined .htaccess files for includes, expires and cache levels built in to aid the developer to decrease the page load time of any plugin developed.

I find the ubiquitous Google Analytics code snippets and the massively popular addthis.com bookmark php snippet to be very laggy, slowing down so many sites; it's not only unbelievable, but quite intolerable today.