On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I actually think what would be the best solution here is to hide all
the Wikipedia chrome for screens, and replace it with links to Home
(and in future Search) at the top. I've knocked up a patch that does
this - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/138867 and would be interested
in your views.

Here's roughly what the browsing experience would look like with Jon's patch, presuming media query support for max-width:


Opera Mini supports max-width and max-device-width
If you'd like to test this on Opera Mini, I've added a java emulator with mini4 and mini8 jad/jar files here:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-yck2WBt5TwekdHa0kxN0psRk0&usp=sharing

Instructions are simple:
 - Have Java
 - Double-click/run the microemulator.jar file
 - [optional] Options->Select device->Resizable device->Resize
 - File->Open->mini4.jad or mini8.jad
 

It's unclear if removal of /all/ of the chrome is optimal. Although there's a need for some slight improvement in the UX of the searchbar for users on Opera (and other <noscript> or RL JS-restricted UAs) today, taking away the search box at the top of the page would get rid of perhaps 136,000 searches per day on Opera sourced searches from from article display (contrast this with 100-300 successful Add to Watchlist actions per day on Opera).

$ zcat /a/squid/archive/mobile/mobile-sampled-100.tsv.log-20140611.gz | grep 'proxy=Opera' | grep '/w/index.php?search=' | cut -f12 | grep -c '/wiki/'
1362

Search is usually a big deal on mobile phones/Opera. So it probably helps to keep that bar, just with some background image or CSS borders. Opera Mini has pretty good support for CSS. I recommend taking a look at m.facebook.com on Opera Mini 4 and 8, to see how they're dealing with our rendering. (Not that their UI applies to wikimedia, but that their heavy use of CSS shows what's possible.)
 

$ zcat /a/squid/archive/mobile/mobile-sampled-100.tsv.log-20140611.gz | grep 'proxy=Opera' | grep -c 'action=watch'
1

-Adam




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Gautam Chandna | Director - Technical Partner Management | gautamc@opera.com | +47-4567-1789