Every page on Subeta loads a stack of code libraries before it shows you anything. A library is a chunk of someone else's code you load so you don't have to write it yourself, and a lot of ours are more than ten years old. Some of them are only used on one or two pages, but they load on every page you visit, phone and data plan included.

I'm clearing them out. Before compression, every page still loads about 1.1 MB of this old code. This week about 200 KB of it came off every page:

• Handlebars, twice. Version 4.0.6 (2016) and version 2.0.0-alpha.4 (2014) both loaded, the older one second, so it overwrote the newer one. Nothing on the site used either of them.
• lodash 4.17.2 (2016) and jquery.touch, also unused.

qTip came off the 26 explore map pages too, where it never drew a single... qTip?

Modalbox, a popup window library from 2007, is gone as well. Popups now use the browser's own dialog element. If you saw an empty popup box sitting on every page recently, that was this work (sorry!)

Icons changed too. The site was drawing them from three different sets: Font Awesome 4, Semantic UI's icon font, and Bootstrap 2's glyphicons. Now every icon comes from one set, Font Awesome's Sharp Duotone, so they finally match each other. A few of the old glyphicon spots were drawing nothing at all and show their icons now. Expect some icons to look a little different while we adjust sizes and colors around the site.

Still loading on every page:

• Prototype 1.7.0 (2010) and script.aculo.us 1.8.1 (2008). They're in the oldest code history we have, from 2010. Prototype is the biggest script on the page at 205 KB. It's honestly impressive that we are still including these.
• Tipped (2014), which draws the hover cards on items and users, and can be replaced by browser defaults now.
• jQuery 3.2.1 and Bootstrap 4.0.0-beta.2, both from 2017. Yes, a beta. We never moved to the final release.
• Semantic UI 0.19.3 (2014). Its stylesheet is 340 KB, bigger than any script on the page.
• Font Awesome 4.6.3 (2016). The site's own icons don't use it anymore, but pet profiles and some custom CSS do, so it stays for now 😭

Most of what these libraries do is built into browsers now. Finding things on the page, fades and slides, and loading data without a refresh have been built in for years, over ten for some of it. Popups only made it into every browser in 2022, and hover popovers in 2023. Every library I swap for the built-in version is code you don't have to download, and your browser doesn't have to run it before the page works. That should make the site feel faster, especially on a phone. And don't worry, I'm going to build in graceful fallback for these, if your browser doesn't have them, but fallback that still use best practices and weren't made in 2010.

The catch is that every page has to be moved over by hand, so for a while some things might look a little off, like a button that's the wrong size or a popup with odd spacing. If something looks broken, post the page link in the forums and I'll take a look.