I blamed the starfield

The starfield spread. Particles were still gathering into the title. I watched my own homepage and waited.

The waiting was already the bug. A site of mine should not make time audible on the first screen. My guess was lazy: the most elaborate layer must be the slow one. Stars, particles, fluid — they all looked guilty.

Measurement was less flattering. Desktop scores can look heroic. On a phone the largest piece of content took its time. What the browser calls “largest” was not the moving sky. To it, the sky barely counted as paint. What held the metric was the title underneath, still hidden for a while so an animation could take over. Hidden text cannot finish painting. Fonts arriving late stretched the pause further.

I nearly rewrote the particles. That rewrite would have made the page prettier. It would barely have shortened the wait I could feel.

The fixes were homely. Let the title exist as type first. Particles can land on top if they are able; if not, the words stay. If a web font is late, keep the fallback. Do not swap widths mid-sentence and reflow a whole paragraph. Chinese is hungry for that discipline. Fallback and webfont can disagree enough on a single glyph to rebreak a line.

Theme toggle stuttered on phones too. One tap and every color shifted together. It felt like a slow button. It was too many layers easing at once. Now only the floor and the type ease, briefly. The rest jump. Nobody has asked for those jumps to be animated.

Glass cards added blur. Pretty. Stack enough of them and a weak device fights the canvases. We grade it now: stronger machines may blur deeper; weaker ones drop a step. Pixel density on the sky was pulled back too. You can hardly see it. The fan is a little quieter.

I still open the site on my own phone first. Scores are a language you speak afterward. The body knows whether it waited. When it does, I am slower to accuse the starfield. It is loud, so it looks like a culprit. What actually holds you is often a line of silent type, or a font still on the road.