"Countdown to Connect" is slow and can I please remove it

If you really believe a countdown timer is significantly impacting your browser, change the forum view by clicking on the dropdown button in the lower left corner of the main screen & select the 'vB4 default' view.

That's countdown timer is not acting as reliably as I'd want and I'm looking into an alternative. However, the page loads asynchronously. So it shouldn't matter if that element is taking a while. You don't need to wait for it to go about your business.

Absolutely no problem for me running Chrome.

FWIW, a couple of times today I've noticed it show a 503 error instead of the timer. Doesn't impact my ability to view the page, but thought I'd point it out in case someone was interested in looking into it.