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Google has been working on adding a site speed report to Google Analytics for some time, but this week they made it available to all users by default. No additional code necessary, just dive in to Google Analytics under the Content menu.

Under the Content menu, you'll see Site Speed between Site Content and Site Search. Here you can access everything from the average page load time for the site to page load time by location.

Patience is a virtue, but it's not best to test your audience's virtue as a rule. To put it another way, speed up your site or risk losing your audience to sites that perform better. If you're looking for ideas on how to improve your site or Web application's performance, we've got a mix tools and essays on site performance that will help you get started.

Google is now offering its Page Speed service, which just released a Chrome extension last week, as a browser-agnostic Web service called Page Speed Online. Just enter a URL and get the results. It also has a new feature offering suggestions for mobile optimization.

According to the Page Speed FAQ, "Page Speed Online provides the same analysis as the Page Speed browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, without needing to install a browser extension." Google suggests the browser extensions for testing pages not available to the public Internet, such as corporate intranets and sites under development. However, I receive slightly different results when running tests using the browswer extension instead of the Web-only service.

Google has finally released an experimental Chrome extension for its popular Page Speed service. Page Speed, which is already available for Firefox, analyzes Web pages and gives developers suggestions for improving performance.

Instructions for installing the extension, which involves enabling support for experimental extensions, are here.

With the increasing amount of bandwidth we're all sucking down these days, it's no surprise that we often feel like our Internet speeds just aren't fast enough. But how fast are our connections? And how does one country stack up against another? Royal Pingdom has released some data today, based on information from the CDN provider Akamai that compares connections speeds internationally. The report looks at the "real world speeds" (not just what service providers advertise) for people in the 50 countries with the most Internet users - all told 1.8 billion Internet users.

Today Google released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module that automates many of Google's Page Speed optimization recommendations. The mod currently offers 18 configurable filters. You'll probably need root access to install this on your server, but Google is working with GoDaddy to bring this to shared hosting customers. Hopefully, other hosts will follow. Google is also working with CDN provider Contendo to bring mod_pagespeed to its service. If you use WordPress and want to implement some of these fixes without root access, you can try the W3 Total Cache plugin (which is still in pre-1.0 release).

Google has been obsessed with speeding up the web for quite a while now. The company's most recent efforts towards this goal include Google Instant for speeding up search, the Page Speed tool for developers and webmasters and the more low-level SPDY protocol which augments the HTTP standard.

Today, Google is also introducing mod_pagespeed, a newmodule for Apache, the open-source Web server that runs most of the world's websites. This new module includes more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that can reduce page load times by up to 50%.

This weekend, venture capitalist and avid blogger Fred Wilson pointed out an interesting blog post written by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. In the article, Atwood explains how his company takes advice from Charles de Mar - a character in the 1985 movie Better Off Dead - who rather bluntly tells a first time skier to "go that way, really fast." Atwood says his company has focused mainly on speed, and believes speed of iteration is more valuable than quality.

Back in February at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Miami, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson presented on his 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. For those not fortunate enough to attend the conference, a video and transcript of the talk and subsequent Q&A session with Wilson is now available online for the general public to learn what one of the leading east coast investors advises startups do to succeed on the Web.

The latest update to the Firefox web browser has now been made available. Released Friday evening, Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 promises a number of new features, including built-in theme support and drag-and-drop file uploads, but perhaps most importantly, there is a renewed focus on browser speed. Claiming improved JavaScript performance, better overall responsiveness and faster startup times, there's no doubt Firefox's development in these areas has been fueled, at least in part, by the speed increases achieved by its rivals, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.