Measurement tools for high performance

Measurement Tools

We already know what to measure when we are talking about web performance. The next step is to understand which tools available on the market will help us with measurements on mobile web engines.

Remote Inspectors

One of the most useful tools for us are remote debuggers or remote inspectors. They allow us to connect a desktop browser’s tools with a mobile counterpart to do analysis and profiling and get reports from a mobile device. This is particularly useful when measuring things that will be different from the desktop’s viewport or that are network-dependent (and therefore using a real phone to test the user experience makes a difference).

Note

The RemoteDebug project is an open initiative to bring interoperability between different browser vendors and different developer tools. It’s still in the early stages, so in the meantime we will have to use the developer tools available on each platform.

Safari on iOS

If you have a MacBook or a Mac desktop computer and an iOS device, you can remotely debug websites, home screen web apps, and hybrid applications on the iOS Simulator and on actual devices.

Warning

Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is no way to open the iOS web debugger from a Windows or Linux desktop computer. We must rely on other nonnative solutions if we need to debug from a non-Mac desktop computer.

To use the Web Inspector on iOS, you must first enable it from the iOS device (it’s enabled by default on the Simulator), by going ...