wtf is telescope?

Telescope is a tool that tests how fast your website loads and performs by running it through real web browsers. Instead of just giving you a load time, it captures a full picture of what happens when someone visits your page: a video of the load, a screenshot, performance metrics, console logs, and detailed timing data for every resource the browser fetches. It supports major browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, so you can see how your site behaves across different environments. At its core, it is a command-line tool. You install it, then tell it to test a specific URL with a specific browser. Behind the scenes, it launches a real browser instance, loads your page, and records everything that happens during that load. The results are saved as a set of files you can keep locally. There is also a companion web app hosted at telescopetest.io where you can upload those results and explore them through an interactive dashboard showing waterfalls, filmstrips, and metric breakdowns. This is built for developers, QA engineers, or performance teams who need to understand why a page is slow or how changes affect load behavior. For example, if your team ships a new feature and wants to verify it did not regress page load times across browsers, you could run it as part of your testing pipeline. It is also useful for anyone who wants a visual, shareable report of how a page loads rather than just raw numbers. The project is structured as a monorepo with two parts: the command-line testing tool and the web app for viewing results. The testing side relies on Playwright, an open-source browser automation framework. The web app is built on Astro and runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure. One thing to note: installing the tool also downloads browser binaries, which take up roughly 700 megabytes of space.