jQuery was 87KB. Lightbox2 was another 10KB, plus a CSS file and four UI images the library needed for its close buttons and navigation arrows. All of that is gone now — replaced by a single vanilla JS file under 7KB that does everything the old stack did. Gallery navigation with wrap-around, keyboard support, scroll locking, caption display, adjacent image preloading. Same IIFE pattern as the video lightbox I built last week.

The video player got its own round of trimming. I'd been eagerly loading hls.js and the video lightbox script on every page that contained video links — 149KB of transfer whether anyone clicked play or not. Now both scripts lazy-load on the first actual click. The hls.js library itself moved from a CDN with a seven-day cache to self-hosted with a one-year immutable header. And the encryption got a quiet upgrade: random IVs instead of deterministic MD5-based ones.

None of these changes alter how anything looks. Every byte saved is invisible.