Re:300ms Faster: Reducing Wikipedia's Total Blocking Time
by tuukkah on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @01:11AM
(#36121337)
Yeah, if you use a user setting such as a non-default skin, you should arguably instead install a browser extension or use a client app built on top of PCS (the Page Content Service API): https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#/Page%20content
The main things that are different:
* the user links (shows what user you are logged in)
* whether you have a new message notification
* your skin preferences (this will totally change the entire html)
* your language preference (normally this only affects the UI not page content, but some pages it affects page content)
* other misc preferences can affect wikipage content (e.g thumbnail size), although there has been a general effort to avoid adding new ones and remove existing ones that arent used.
* some stuff makes assumptions about logged in users not being varnish (e.g. how csrf tokens work for js based actions), but most of those can be changed if push came to shove.
That said there might be a reasonable argument that much of this isnt needed and it would be a net benefit to kill most of those features.