User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: February 1, 2017/@comment-5558012-20170202002046/@comment-126761-20170202164859

We're experimenting with different looks and behaviours for the rail and footer modules - looking at how visitors/users make use of them (or don't) will help us make decisions about their future.

The performance effect of this footer should be very low - it's loaded late, far down the page, and only contains static images and text. We're looking into further refinements around that, like better compression on the images used.