I’ve used Google’s Page Speed plug-in for Firebug a lot since it was released last year. Even though it’s not as good as Yahoo’s YSlow plug-in, it’s still very usable for some scenarios YSlow doesn’t support – my favorite being the analysis of unused CSS and selector optimizations.

It also has a feature that will tell you how much your web page will gain by minifying the HTML.

Not only does it analyze the difference but it can also generate an optimized version of your HTML. It removes unnecessary whitespace which in most cases are pretty harmless. But, it does more than that. It actually strips out attribute quotes from the HTML elements as well as remove the closing </body> and </html> tags. This renders the entire page invalid according to any WC3 (X)HTML standards. 

Even though it is a good idea to minify your HTML, this feature of the Page Speed plug-in makes it completely useless to me. Unless you’re Google, Twitter or Facebook, this feature is just strange.

At the Mix10 conference, the Windows Phone 7 teams had some very big announcements – a lot of it had been kept secret and first revealed to the public now. There is however still some details they keep secret. Some of these secrets are the user agents of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 7, which they simply wouldn’t give us.

After playing with Windows Phone 7 we managed to secure a copy of the user agent string. The user agent for IE on Windows Phone 7 running on the Asus Galaxy device is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0) Asus;Galaxy6

Notice that it identifies the browser as IE7 and the operating system as Windows Phone OS 7. The IE team told us that the browser in Windows Phone 7 is a mobile version of IE7 with certain features ported from IE8. So it doesn’t use the full Trident 4 layout engine that IE8 uses, but instead Trident version 3.1 with a few extra capabilities.

The user agent was retrieved from server logs, so it is the actual user agent from the actual browser.