Voicebox has been rebuilt. It looks essentially the same and it weighs about a fifth of what it did. If you use it, you do not need to do anything.
What was in there
Voicebox was one of our older designs and it had accumulated the usual things old designs accumulate. A slider library used for one element. An icon font of two thousand glyphs, of which it used nine. Three separate stylesheets that partly contradicted each other. A copy of a JavaScript library that a later version of the same library had already replaced, both loading.
None of this was visible. It was all just slower than it needed to be, by roughly 1.4 megabytes.
What we removed
- The slider library. The one element that used it is now nine lines of stylesheet.
- The icon font, replaced by inline vector icons for the nine icons in use.
- Two of the three stylesheets, merged and deduplicated.
- The duplicate library.
- Four web font weights that were loaded and never applied.
What we added
The audio improvements from VoiceNow: on-demand player loading, waveform display, and proper support for the playlist categories in audio playlists. Also a fixed booking line, and a studio setup panel, both of which turned out to be the most useful things on the newer design.
Why we rebuilt rather than retired it
Because people are using it and it works. A design being old is not a reason to remove it, and telling somebody their site's look is being discontinued is a genuinely unpleasant thing to do to a person who chose it.
The general policy: designs get maintained, and they only get retired if they cannot be made to work on a phone. Modern browsers change, and a template nobody maintains eventually breaks in a way nobody notices until a casting director sees it.
The measurable bit
Initial page weight down from about 1.8 megabytes to 340 kilobytes. Time to interactive on a mid-range phone down from 4.2 seconds to under 1. Nothing about the layout changed.
Similar work across the rest of the catalog is in faster page loads across all designs and faster stylesheets.
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