(Actually found some info if anyone is curious: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/w.... Though the article helps explain some of the context and reasoning, I don't think it really justifies the divergent experience and imperceptible progress on improving the desktop experience)
However, I'm suprised that this is neccessary for wikipedia. I guess it was more work to write the extension than to fix whatever is going on on wikipedias side. But then, on the other hand, maybe writing the extension and stop caring about what is going on on wikipedia is easier.
Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.
For a long page, scrolling to the bottom might take even longer than just changing the URL. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts to scroll to the bottom, but so there are shortcuts to edit the URL bar. It is, in any case, an annoyance that always(!) takes some extra time.
[Edit: I love that switching to the desktop version is literally the very last word/link of the mobile version. Even after the link to the "Privacy policy" and the "Terms of Use" that probably nobody in the history of homo sapiens ever clicked]
> Secondly, there's discussion about serving everything from a single domain at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T214998 , which I guess would enable the normal mobile browser feature of switching between desktop and mobile.
The last comment on this discussion is, quite ironically: "Have been somewhat expecting this to be fixed for the better part of 7+ years now. Hopefully this can be implemented soon!"
Except there should not be two versions at all and instead they should just make the desktop version responsive and strip out the bloat - I don't want an article to on desktop to load six different javascript files and have a giant banner at the top any more than on mobile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test is 27 different requests for me - that is inexcusable for mostly text content.
The work "discuss" does not show up in the source code, you can check "curl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test | grep -i discuss"
The discussion is called "talk" on the desktop version, but it is also missing on the mobile one. Or there is some javascript trickery going on, but I clearly dont get it.
And this is how it looks in my Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/LQ7pmH8
You need to login and enable "advanced mode" in setting (in hamburger menu) to see it.
But this also means that every mobile user of wikipedia (I guess the majority now?) which is not logged in and enabled that feature (for sure the majority) does not even know about the discussion pages of wikipedia articles. This is super sad.
Mobile has higher latency and a small screen, so its important that I not need to make lots of request and its important that I can search inside documents. Both of which are broken by wikipedia's mobile interface.
So people like myself constantly have to edit the "m." from wikipedia links to get the normal version. I really dont get why they are doing that.