Google Page Speed and Google’s JavaScript

Google recently introduced a Firebug extension, called Google Page Speed. Simply, it’s a Google version of YSlow. I heard the author of YSlow, Steve Souders moved to Google, so I thought it’s a bit awkward corporate feeling but he himself said that he is not involved with this project. But even so, Yahoo has a hard time anyway.

As other Google’s products, Google Page Speed is also open source project, hosted on Google Code. So I was curious to browse their code. I don’t really read anything but JavaScript, and I found very familiar code on their internal library: /src/js/closure/base.js.

Do you remember when I talked about Google’s bad contamination on google_service.js before?

The problem is fixed now but you can find very identical code to the code I quoted on the post (well, it’s obfuscated, but you can imagine). I have strong feeling that the one I accused, “google_service.js” contains the google closure, or maybe it was just a google closure.

And I also found a project named Google Closure. It’s empty so far, and its founder is… ExplorerCanvas guy!

I originally had a very difficult feeling about so-called Google Closure, because it potentially breaks lots of other library as I stated on the post. But if it’s open sourced and I will definitely be more interested in. What it does so far is very… engineering smart. Somethng you must need on JavaScript. It comes with lots of lots of comments, and its abstraction level is very clear. Maybe I should do drill down series of blog post about it?