the sizes are unminified, ungzipped
Looking at the gzipped figures:
- this change would add 104.8kb of minified gzipped JS+CSS, loaded async in the footer of pages that have thumbnails on them
- a page like Lightbox_demo loads 95.6kb of external JS+CSS currently (there's a bunch of inline JS and CSS as well, though, which is hard to measure)
You're right, I didn't realize how bloated Media Viewer was, which makes my proposal a bad idea, since it would more than double the amount of JS+CSS loaded on articles. Our dependencies seem to play a large part:
- jquery.color 0.5kb
- jquery.colorUtil 1.2kb
- jquery.fullscreen 0.7kb
- jquery.scrollTo 1.4kb
- jquery.tipsy 2.2kb
- mediawiki.Uri 1.4kb
- mediawiki.ui 0.8kb
- mediawiki.ui.button 1.1kb
- moment 11.5kb (!)
- oojs 2.4kb
- oojs-ui 40.1kb (!)
Totalling 63.3kb (60% of Media Viewer's weight)
This is yet another argument against OOjs UI, which has caused us so many problems. But now isn't the time to back out of it, we have to stick with it for the launch period. Moment is also questionable, considering how little functionality it provides (couldn't it be replaced by more server-side processing of dates?).
I guess an alternative is to start preloading Media Viewer's JS and CSS when the mouse cursor gets near thumbnails. What do you think of that? Doesn't solve the problem for touch screens, but the benefit for desktop would be tangible.