Google is a company known for its focus on speed and responsiveness. That speed can be attributed to a number of things but an important part of that is code optimization. And now you can use the same tools Google uses as it has released an internal tool called Page Speed.

The Mountain View-based company's focus on speed is obvious in all of the things it does, from its search engine to Google Chrome, and from Picasa to Android, and it owes some of that speed to its minimalistic design choices and all of the computing power coming from the multitude of server farms. But probably the biggest part of that speed is achieved thanks to code optimization and, to help streamline its sites, the search giant has been using Page Speed, a tool developed internally. Now the company is releasing the new solution as an open-source project, since Page Speed is a Firefox add-on that also integrates with Firebug, the web development tool.

After you run Page Speed you will be given a set of information to guide you in optimizing the parts that are slower in your site. “For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display,” wrote the Page Speed development team on the Google Code Updates blog.

Page Speed's recommendations are based on a set of best practices that Google itself uses, as do other sites. The tool is actually very similar to YSlow, the Firefox add-on that Yahoo developed for the very same purpose and which we've reviewed just recently. You can download Page Speed from right here.