One of our top priorities is making sure installing chartbeat does not affect the experience for your sites’ users. Keeping our code small, distributed via a CDN, and loaded at the bottom of the page went a long way towards doing that. However, some sites challenged us to go even further. That’s why we’re excited to launch a new version of the chartbeat code that goes into your page. This new version waits until your page has completely finished loading, and only then does it even begin to load the chartbeat Javascript. You can find it at http://chartbeat.com/code/

We’ve also been making various other smaller changes to improve the performance of chartbeat, removing some experimental code and minimizing the size of the cookie we set. Rest assured we’ll keep striving to make chartbeat leaner. If you feel that chartbeat is slowing your site down, remember Firefox may be tricking you, and please vote up the Firefox bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383811.