Pingdom Tools is a free set of web-based tools for webmasters and other web-curious people. We launched it this summer and it has proven extremely popular. So far, more than two million tests have been performed with its graphical website load time, ping and traceroute tests.

We have just added a major improvement to this tool: The ability to save tests, which can then be accessed by anybody through a direct link.

Why is this so cool?

1. Because you can see exactly how a site was behaving at a specific point in time.
2. It becomes extremely easy to share the results of a test so others can examine it.

Since the AJAX-based graphical interface of Pingdom Tools makes it easy to pinpoint why a site is slow (or down, for that matter), a lot of people post screenshots of tests in forums and blogs. Web hosts can also use Pingdom Tools when communicating with their users, or vice versa. We wanted to give even more power to those users.

With the new save and link features sharing this information will be easier than ever. Just save your test and you will have a permanent link you can send to anyone as proof. They will be able to see exactly the result you got and when the test was performed.

A saved test is much better than just a screenshot, because you can properly examine, sort and filter the saved result.

And if a site is down, you have the Ping and Traceroute tools to help you find potential connectivity problems.

See all previous test results

You will now be able to see a list of all previous (saved) tests of a website when you perform a test in Pingdom Tools. In March, you will be able to go back and look at tests that you or anyone else performed in January. If a website is tested regularly, you will have a really handy list of historical tests to look at. This gives you lots of opportunities to compare “before-and-after” results, to name just one possibility.

With this feature Pingdom Tools has become a lot more powerful, and the more people use it, the more powerful it will become.

Share, share and share some more

We are very happy about all the positive feedback we have received about Pingdom Tools and that so many people are using it. We hope that these new additions will help people share test results among themselves to an even greater degree and that Pingdom Tools will keep acting as a great resource to the webmaster and web developer community (and everyone else as well!).

Note: Currently all Pingdom Tools tests are performed from Dallas, TX, USA. More locations will be added in the future.

Read more about how to use Pingdom Tools to analyze websites.

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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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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