What is going on when the site is loading?

[merefield (Robert)]

Introducing Discourse Splash - A visual preloader displayed while site assets load

Discourse is a single-page Javascript application. This means that navigation within the app is blazingly fast. The compromise with modern web applications is that they must be loaded and parsed on the initial page view. While we’ve been doing a lot of work over the years to optimize how we serve site assets, this can sometimes be a little bit slow based on device/network conditions. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been actively working and testing potential improvements for the initial wait th…