New test profiles, pulse and metric updates, and more!

Often when I write release posts, they’re about huge far reaching changes, but sometimes it’s important to iterate on smaller features that can still have a big impact for a lot of people.

This release is exactly that.

Be sure to read through to the end, to get a sneak peek at what’s coming soon. 🎁

🔌 New Test Profiles

Since the debut of Test Profiles back in March there has been a lot of interest in testing options that give further insight to real-world customer situations.

Here’s two new profiles that go towards that goal.

Motorola Moto G4

If you read Beyond the Bubble, you’ll know that some effort has gone into finding a single device to use for web testing purposes that best covers ‘a global average’. Right now, that device is a Motorola G4.

Calibre now offers a Moto G4 emulation setting — as with other emulation targets, it will emulate the CPU Speed, User-Agent and Screen dimensions of a Moto G4. 👍

“Emerging Markets” connection speed

If you’ve ever used WebPageTest for one-off performance tests, you might have noticed a connection emulation setting named ‘Emerging Markets’.

Plenty of customers have asked to have this exact option in Calibre, so here it is.

🔝 Request Priority

If you were to take a guess as to what the most important resources on a page were, they might be:

• HTML
• app.css
• app.js
• Fonts
• Hero image

These are better known as Critical requests that are required before your customers see anything valuable. When browsers load pages, priorities are assigned to each request. For example, a script that is loaded using <script src="app.js" defer> will have a lower priority than without the defer attribute.

Calibre now shows the priority that the browser used for each request:

🖌Improved Pulse page

Pulse is designed to provide an entry point to investigating performance, but it was leaving a lot of customers with one simple request:

“This is great, but I really want to change pages”

I couldn’t agree more. Here it is.

🖌More Granular Metrics

Now 6, 3 and 1 Month averages are broken down by Test Profile. You’ll see every metric, and its long term updates. Wahoo!

🕵 Sneak Peek: Spot the difference

Plenty of performance analysis work involves multiple browser tabs, switched in quick succession to see the subtle differences between numbers.

There needs to be a faster way to compare change over time.

Calibre Comparisons Soon, you’ll be able to notify Calibre when you’ve deployed, then compare each deploy side by side. 🖼🖼

It’ll include all the snapshots taken in-between deploys, with the critical metrics and videos that you’d expect.

Keep an eye out for it, it’s coming soon.

We have so much more that we’re excited to share with you as we continue our mission to make the Web fast for everyone. 🌍🌏🌎

If you’ve got a spare moment, it’d be great if you could share this post. ✌️

Ben Schwarz

Ben is the founder of Calibre. He regularly speaks at conferences worldwide and has been involved in far reaching open source projects as well as web standards. Find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.