Just a few minutes ago Google announced Page Speed Service. It’s a service that’s super simple to set up – web app developers to point their app’s DNS at Google. In return, Google handles rewriting web pages for performance and does things like concatenating scripts and css files and the other best practices outlined by Google in their Page Speed guidelines. You can read the announcement on the Google Code Blog.
From what I can tell, Google is proxying all of the web app’s requests to accomplish this feat, and that makes me extremely wary for any kind of app that handles private data. Call me crazy, but I don’t want them handling my customers’ credit card numbers and critical personal information. Even if they do handle it completely responsibly, the privacy concerns that people have about Google could turn into a nightmare for anyone using this service. For smaller apps that avoid private data, though, transferring all data through Google might be a reasonable tradeoff. That said, things like the upcoming Rails 3.1 asset pipeline or just a bit of elbow grease make really optimized assets and pages pretty easy to put together. Even hosting your assets on a CDN is pretty easy to pull off these days.
I’ll continue keeping up with Google’s page speed research and implementing their guidelines as they make sense, but I’m going to steer clear of Page Speed Online.
What do you think? Would you ever use Page Speed Online?