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:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxJX28FKLm78dDNPN29naGlPSEk/edit?pli=1

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

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

-Adam