What came off the about page, and why

The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list line by line against the software, and four entries no longer matched it. One of them had not matched for years.

They are gone. Here is what they were, because a quiet deletion is worth less than an explanation — and because the list on that page is now checked against the code rather than against its own previous version.

Screen resolutions

Advertised on the page, and not collected — on purpose, since 10 August. The measurement was a read of the visitor's device and a good way to recognise the same person again, and it was not worth what it cost anybody.

Taking it out of the script was not enough on its own: the script is cached in browsers for up to a week, and some sites embed a copy they pasted years ago. Those kept sending the value. So the server stopped accepting the parameter at all, which ends the collection now rather than eventually. The figures gathered before that date are still there and no longer grow.

What stayed on the page is what is still measured, and the post about counting without a cookie covers the reasoning.

Site speed

There is a post from 2013 announcing it, and it worked. It belonged to the previous version of this system and it did not come back in the rebuild. An old announcement staying up is fine — that is a record of what happened. Listing it in the present tense on the page where somebody decides whether to use this is not.

Internet Explorer and Windows 8

Browsers and operating systems are still recognised, versions included, and that part of the page stayed. What went was the framing: naming Internet Explorer and Windows 8 as the impressive thing to detect reads like a page written in 2013, which is exactly what it was.

Regional maps for Russia

The regional breakdowns are real and they are worth having. They exist for Germany, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, the United States and Canada. Russia was on the list on the page and not in the software.

The same paragraph also promised animated globes. There are globe-shaped flag counters and there is a world map on the statistics page; a live animated globe there is not.

Why bother writing this down

A feature list is a promise, and somebody picks a tool on the strength of it. Four entries that had drifted away from the software are four people arriving for something that is not here, which is what makes the check worth its cost.

The drift also reached ten languages at once. The text had been translated years ago and every translation carried the same entries, so correcting the English alone would have left nine copies standing. That is the argument for keeping the promises short and checking them against the code rather than against last year's version of the page, which is how the current page is maintained.

Update, 11 September 2026: From 27 August 2026 the script read the screen resolution, the width of the browser window and the pixel ratio again, on every site that embedded it. Since 11 September 2026 it does so only where the site owner switches it on with data-screen="1". Without that attribute the current script reads none of the three, and the server no longer stores them from older copies either.