Now you can finally find out why a website loads so slowly. Is it that huge banner, or because the site is using more than 300 images?

Pingdom Tools is meant to be a great set of utilities for webmasters and other curious web dwellers. First out is the Full Page Test, a tool for analyzing website load times. It also allows you to see exactly what is included on a page, and since the tool uses AJAX you get immediate feedback.

Above: Partial screenshots of a test in progress. You can find screenshots of tests on various websites over at Flickr. Or you can just get right to the action.

How does it work?

The Full Page Test mimics the way a web browser loads a website. It will load the HTML page and all the objects in it, such as images, CSS files, scripts, Flash files, frames/iframes, etc. You can view the type, size and load time of every object. It will even parse objects inside CSS files.

To make it easy to view the objects, they can be shown in either load order or as a clearly ordered hierarchy. As a bonus, broken links to objects will be marked red. They are more common than you might think.

We allow pages up to 5 MB in size to be loaded, and a maximum of 500 objects per page. Requests will time out after 30 seconds.

This is version one of the Full Page Test. It’s already a great tool, but just wait until you see what we have in store for the future.

The future of Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools is currently running on one dedicated server, but we will add more servers and features down the line. The Full Page Test is just the first of several tools that will be launched under the Pingdom Tools umbrella. Pingdom Tools is meant as a complement to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service, but is freely available to the public. It’s also a great place for our own developers to experiment with cool ideas and features.

The Pingdom Full Page Test was inspired by the OctaGate SiteTimer. We really liked the idea but wanted to take it one step further. One of our developers built this in two weeks (thank you Nenad).

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

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There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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