[benschwarz]

Hi! Author of the post here.

Lighthouse definitely has some improvements to make for the audit suggestions that offer advice to improve the score. I think people get a little bit frustrated/blinded by the advice when there's nothing that can be done about third parties (I know I do!).

Our product Calibre (mentioned in the bottom of the post) has a n adblocking/third party blocking feature that allows you to compare your pages with or without third party scripts gunking up performance metrics (here's the release post: https://calibreapp.com/blog/release-notes-apr-2019/).

We've seen really good success in separating the two because it sends a clear signal of what a site WOULD score without ads. This is good because it makes it clear to PMs, management and decision makers that tracking tools incur a really visible cost.

[cmroanirgo]

You realise that calibre is also the name of a very well known ebook management app that's been around forever? I thought this was a post from them, initially. I'd imagine your website would get a lot of bounces due to this.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

[benschwarz]

… but to answer your question better. It sucks that Google's own services don't live up to the performance expectations of tools made in other parts of Google.

[mikece]

I imagine the various teams at Google see each other as competition more than we might realize. How many chat-like applications are there? How about the Java/Kotlin Android teams versus the Flutter team? All of the GPL die-hards looking at the non-GPL (MIT, BSD, and Apache2) Fuchsia project wondering just how committed Google is to the Linux kernel.

[skybrian]

Yes, different teams have different priorities, but there isn't direct competition between a performance-measuring tool and ad-serving.

In this case it's probably more the performance team wanting to do unbiased measurement. As they should.

[liveoneggs]

if google could gain a market advantage similar to the one they got from linux (for free) they would do so immediately no matter the "cost" to linux/OSS/the-world-at-large

[bradknowles]

So, I'm curious.

How does https://calibreapp.com/ compare to https://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://www.sitespeed.io/ and https://gtmetrix.com/ ?

Why would someone want to pay you for your service, as opposed to using any of the above? Do you support browsers other than Chrome? Do you support a wide variety of simulated hardware? Do you support a wide variety of testing locations? Do you support any page speed test profile other than Lighthouse and Google Page Speed? Do you support running your software in a Docker container of my own choice?

Because I can get all those things via one or more of the competitors in this space, and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to even look at Calibre.

Please feel free to convince me that I'm wrong.

[youngtaff]

Depends on your use case - I recommend Calibre to some clients, SpeedCurve to others and self hosted WebPageTest or Sitespeed.io to others.

One of the key deciding factors is do you want to run the service yourself e.g. VMs, containers, in multiple regions or do you want to make that someone else's problem and get on with running your business - most of my clients are in the later camp

Both Calibre and SpeedCurve have clean UI's that allow performance to be tracked over time, from multiple locations and integration with other services via web hooks, APIs etc.

GTMetrix is old and outdated IMV, - it still heavily relies on YSlow rules which are well past their sell-by-date

WebPageTest is my favourite (SpeedCurve uses it under the hood) but it's got no ability to track over time, SiteSpee.io is really nice too but is self-hosted.

With the exception of some real devices in Dulles, all of the products rely on emulation for mobile, and Safari is a real gap for them all too