And some more thoughts -
#2: Missing footer links The links 'View this page on regular Wikipedia', 'Disable images on mobile site' and 'Permanently disable mobile site' disappear from the footer. The last 2 I think can be lived without, and I would imagine these would be better places in a settings page anyhow however view this page on regular wikipedia is. I think the best place for this in the time being is to move it into the navigation menu (revealed when you click the mediawiki logo) and to shorten the text to 'desktop' site. Does anyone have objections to this?
+1 on the rename. We've been wanting to do change it to desktop for a while. In the future I can see us having
'Desktop | Tablet | Mobile' across all sites.
Now for the other functionality. Thats tough as while I agree that it should not be there anymore ... but we don't have enough of the nav design nor do we want to do it just yet. Thus we have three options
Per discussion in IRC yesterday, I'm currently working on changing how switching between desktop/mobile view is handled when the switch is manually requested, in order to keep things simple and intuitive.
When on the desktop view, you will continue to see the 'Mobile view' link at the bottom of a page. Clicking on it will send you to the URL you're currently viewing with 'useformat=mobile' in the query string. MobileFrontend will then set a cookie that will keep you on the mobile site until you elect to no longer be on the mobile site by clicking 'Desktop view' (instead of 'View this page on regular {{sitname}}).
Clicking 'Desktop view' will send you to the URL you're currently viewing with 'useformat=desktop' in the query string. MobileFrontend with then set a cookie that will keep you on the desktop site until you elect to no longer be on the desktop site by clicking 'Mobile view'.
As for 'disable images' - I'm ambivalent about this. I imagine this is useful functionality - do we have any metrics about it?
And as for link placement - I actually think it's best to keep the links in question in the footer. It's not entirely intuitive (at least to me) that clicking the logo will reveal a menu. The footer is where we have the desktop -> mobile link and I think it is valuable to keep that consistent with the mobile view -> desktop view link. If someone wants to switch from mobile -> desktop, they probably want to do it quickly and painlessly, so providing them the easiest, obvious-est way to do so seems the best solution.