Nothing loads until you press play

When you open a page with a YouTube video on it, YouTube knows you were there before you press anything. The same goes for Vimeo and every other player that loads the moment the page does. I did not want that on Simuze, so a video here is a picture with a length and the name of its source on it. Nothing from the video site is loaded until you press play.

That is the whole idea. The player stays closed, nobody's server sees a visitor who did not ask, and pressing play on a video pauses the music that was running. It works for YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and PeerTube, and Simuze does not host any of it.

It started as a privacy choice and turned out to help the speed as well. A page with six embedded players loads six players, and most of them are bigger than the page they sit on. A page with six posters loads six small pictures.

The rest of the site follows the same habit. Pages are built on the server and arrive as plain HTML, so you can read them before any script has run. The stylesheet is one file and the scripts are few and small, and both are named after their own contents, which lets your browser keep them for a year without asking again. Photos are resized into a few sizes when they are first needed, so a phone gets a small picture and a laptop gets a bigger one. The fonts are our own and load once.

I used to build sites where the first thing a visitor waited for was a library that did something I could have done in ten lines. This time I started by leaving things out. There is no jQuery on Simuze and no tracking script, and there is no chat bubble in the corner.

The music player keeps playing while you move around, because it sits outside the part of the page that changes. If you want it out of the way you can open it in its own small window and carry on browsing in another tab, or on another site.

None of this is clever. It is mostly a matter of not adding things, and then not adding the next thing either.

Love, Marten

Love, Marten