Erik Zachte wrote:
This is a repost in plain readable ascii.
I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus generating a new request to the database, over and over again.
They should use a browser that's not so brain-dead that it can't tell that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are already open and should not be loaded all over again.
My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent changes' page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response times somewhat.
Please, no. I think I know better than my browser when I want to open a page in a new window.
Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond redisplay of the changes list).
Have you considered a browser that provides tabbed browsing?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)