If you are a fan of FireBug (rockin’ plugin for Firefox to debug and see what is going on behind the scene on a site) then you likely use YSlow performance tool to see bottlenecks, file response times, missing objects, etc.

Google released their competing product called Page Speed.

It is pretty slick and I find it an excellent compliment to YSlow, however, it’s not a replacement.  Some of the unique features are pre-minified files, right mouse click to save optimized images in reports and they best of all…a real-time recorder/monitor of site load process.  You can watch as each and every object is loaded and see how long it takes and if it slows down your site.

If you are doing any web design you really need to be using this awesome tool kit of FireBug (http://getfirebug.com/), YSlow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and Page Speed (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/index.html)