A 67% faster start.me is now available to everyone

Update February 24, 2020: We made a faster start.me. Check out this more recent blog post.

Last week we announced the roll-out of version 2 of a faster start.me. We’re happy to announce that, as of today, all users have been migrated to the new site. This means that everyone is now able to experience a faster loading start.me.

+67% Improved Website Load Time

The primary objective of developing a new version of start.me was to improve the loading speed of the site. Below are some statistics that are taken from the last couple of days. On average the First Meaningful Paint has improved (decreased) by 67%.

The actual (perceived) performance per page per user will depend on factors, like: user location, internet connection speed and the number of widgets on a page. However, overall everyone should now be able to enjoy a significantly faster start.me!

Changelog v2

While we focused on improving the loading speed of start.me, we have added several new features in v2. A short summary:

• You can update user preferences settings through a unique sidebar.
• We added a user setting to enable/disable the context menu (right mouse click).
• The “Browse widgets” sidebar now loads faster.
• Google Task widget: now uses drag and drop + we fixed several bugs.
• RSS widget: we added a setting to show full headlines of articles.
• World Clock widget: added support for thousands of new cities around the world.

Bugs fixed since last week

Since the roll-out of the new site last week, various people reported newly introduced problems. Below is a summary of the most critical bugs that we fixed:

• The “Open links in a new window” setting wasn’t respected on sub-domains. FIXED.
• The “?embed=1” parameter to hide the header of start.me wasn’t working. FIXED.
• The “search suggestions” dropdown didn’t close upon hitting ESC. FIXED.
• Various issues related to Themes & Widget Transparency. FIXED.
• RSS widget: articles that were clicked were not marked as visited anymore. FIXED.
• Scrolling issues in Safari (iPhone). FIXED.
• The “Organize Widgets” using drag and drop wasn’t working anymore. FIXED.

Please continue to let us know if something is broken. You can either e-mail us at support@start.me or leave a comment below.

What’s next?

One of our big next projects is to improve the mobile experience of start.me. We’d like start.me to be as useful on your mobile device as it is now on your desktop. Feel free to tell us what you’d like to see next on start.me. Either e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Status Update July 29, 2021