Google today officially announced a new Firefox addon Page Speed that integrated with Firebug and is an ultimate tool for measuring how well optimized your pages are. Google has been using Page Speed as an internal tool and starting today to be opening up the tool to the web design and developer community. You can get immediate suggestions on how to improve and make your site faster. It checks for a wide range of optimization steps, including proxy caching, DNS lookups, CSS combination, Javascript loading and parallel downloads.

Page Speed automatically optimizes images and giving you a compressed image that you can use on your website. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

Page Speed gives specific suggestions for improvement, and gives the page a “score” according to a heuristic that weighs a number of factors.

To use Page Speed, you’ll need to be using Firefox with the Firebug add-on installed. After that, downloading and installing Page Speed is quick and easy.

• http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/