Enabling Speed Tracer on Chrome for Mac

Google released Chrome for Mac, finally, but the extensions don’t work. It’s actually Google’s fault, because the latest Chromium built already supports extensions. And then they release this great-looking Speed Tracer tool, something Yslow and others have not gone before. However, it seems you can’t install it on Mac (although in the example screenshots on Google Code you can actually see Chrome for Mac, oh irony). Well, guess what – you can :)

First, get your hands on a Chromium built that supports extensions, for example here. After installing it, open and navigate to Speed Tracer download and simply install the extension, no configuration necessary.

If you try to run the Speed Tracer now, you will see it calls for a startup flag. So, the second step is to launch Chromium with some command line arguments. I have never tried to do that on a Mac, so I had to Google a bit for a solution, but apparently, this is how you launch applications to pass parameter to them – launch the Terminal and type:

open /Applications/Chromium.app --args '--enable-extension-timeline-api'

And that is all. After you navigate to a page you want to trace, start Speed Tracer and just reload the page again, all activity will be recored. In fact, you can browse around quite a lot and all speed data will be available on a timeline. Enjoy!