We’re happy to report that Selenium IDE 1.0.4 has been released. You can download it here and you can find the release notes here.

While this release doesn’t have many new user-facing features, it does clean up several bugs. More importantly, however, is that Adam Goucher and Jérémy Hérault did some amazing work to lay the foundation for a plugin framework. This means that soon you’ll see Selenium IDE plugins that further expand the Selenium IDE capability.

Jérémy is working on one such plugin, called Helenium (see proof of concept in action), that will allow you to do text matching against images and PDF files using optical character recognition (OCR). We’re also working on a plugin that will make it easier to upload scripts from the IDE to BrowserMob.

If you’re interested in how to build your own plugin, I recommend reading Adam’s blog, which has a series of recent posts on how the plugin framework works.

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Selenium · Selenium IDE

We’re always working hard to improve our BrowserMob monitoring and load testing services. Over the last few weeks, we’ve pushed pushed out a bunch of improvements:

New Monitoring and Load Testing Location

Hot off the heels of Amazon’s announcement of a new US West Coast cloud data center, we are happy to report that you can now schedule load tests and monitoring jobs from this new location. Simply select the “San Jose, CA” location when scheduling tests.

Selenium 2.0 Support

In December, Selenium 2.0 alpha 1 was released. This release dramatically improves the realism and reliability of Selenium scripts. We’re proud to say that you can try out Selenium 2.0 support (but keep in mind it’s still in alpha) by simply changing your selenium script from this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser();

To this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser(true);

We will continue to keep BrowserMob up-to-date with all the latest happenings in the Selenium world, as well as donate our time and code back to the Selenium project. We also upgraded all the BrowserMob browsers to have the latest version of Firefox (3.5.7) and Flash.

Schedule Load Test UI Improvements

We’ve also made scheduling a load test a lot easier. We now give you a realtime estimate of what the test will cost you, changing dynamically based on your test configuration. We also display tooltips explaining things like “location”, “ramp”, and “constant”. Finally, we’re really excited to have rolled out a “Run ASAP” option that will kick off the test as quickly as it can, usually within 10 minutes.

New Script Editor

Our users love that they can write their scripts using JavaScript, so we decided to make working on that JavaScript code even easier. By utilizing the Bespin open source project from Mozilla, you now will see a rich text editor with code syntax highlighting. If for some reason you’re having trouble with it, you can always switch back to the plain text editor.

New Load Test Charts

We’ve always been proud of our realtime load test charts, but some users had recently complained that they were too heavy-weight and were slowing down their browser. Of course, this is a perfect example of why performance in the browser is starting to matter just as much as performance on the server.

Responding to this complaint, we rewrote the charts from scratch, moving from YUI Charts (Flash-based) to Flot (Canvas-based). We hope you like them!

New Scripting API Improvements

If you do advanced scripting, especially with virtual users, you’ll definitely want to take a look out the BrowserMob scripting API. We added a whole bunch of useful functions, including:

• setFollowRedirect(true) now logs all intermediate HTTP requests
• You can now automatically verify response codes
• If a 3xx response code is returned when you expected something else, the Location header is logged
• You can tie in “interceptors” for both HTTP requests and HTTP responses, allowing very advanced scripting techniques

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API · Bespin · Flot · Release Notes · Selenium · Selenium 2 · YUI Charts

Over the last few months Google has continued to focus on performance as a key message to developers. From their “Let’s make the web faster” initiative on Google Code, to their public DNS service, to the constant focus on performance by their Chief Performance guru, Steve Souders, it’s clear that Google wants people to have a faster experience on the web.

This makes sense: the faster the web, the more people will use it and be more likely to search and click on ads. In fact, in an interview with Web Pro News in November last year, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team) casually mentioned that in 2010 Google may give search ranking preference to sites that load faster. Om Malik went on to discuss whether this was a good idea or not.

More recently, Google opened up a new “Labs” feature in their Google Webmaster Tools that actually shows you the performance of your site as measured by the Googlebot. This move is further evidence that Google is indeed going to shift to making performance part of it’s ranking routine if it hasn’t already. See a screenshot of what you can expect to see:

In addition to the above chart, there is also some basic analysis and recommendations on how to improve performance, similar to what Page Speed and YSlow recommend. While it is a good start and provides the clearest view of how Google perceives your site’s performance, the data is still rather basic.

As such, when measuring and optimizing page load times we’d still recommend you work with a more in-depth tool such as Page Speed and YSlow. And, of course, for website monitoring and website load testing, we’d have to recommend BrowserMob

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Firebug · Google · Google Public DNS · Page Speed · Performance · YSlow

Brad Feld, an early stage investor and entrepreneur who runs the popular blog Feld Thoughts, recently dug up an old video showing how things have come almost completely full circle in the world of computing.

The video is embedded below for your convenience. It’s a bit long (~30 minutes), but if you’re interested in today’s cloud computing, it’s pretty entertaining to watch. It definitely gives you a good perspective on the evolution of computing:

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Cloud Computing