There were many changes that I like, but several that were bad.
Listing the latter in order of decreasing importance:
<What links here> no longer indicates what links through redirects.
I think that this is a significant loss of function.
The watchlist no longer watches User: pages or Wikipedia: pages.
It's bad enough that User talk: and Wikipedia talk: weren't watched;
now it's worse.
There are a few links that are now available only from the Quickbar:
<Watch this page>, <What links here>, and <User contributions>.
Can these *please* at least be listed at the bottom of the page?
(I'd actually prefer to keep these items at the top, but the bottom will do.)
The new format is slightly too wide for my window with the Quickbar,
which however isn't a problem if I have the Quickbar turned off,
but I make heavy use of the first of these two links.
I can accept being condemned to an ugly display for my particular setup
if this makes things nicer for a wide class of other users,
but I don't see how putting *anything* *only* on the Quickbar helps *anybody*.
The watchlist also no longer displays nonexistent pages that I'm watching.
You may not believe it, but I actually look at this list.
A construction like "[[thing]]s" no longer mimics "[[things|thing]]"
if the page [[thing]] doesn't exist. This is difficult to read.
"~~~" doesn't change to my name in the <Preview> anymore, only in the
<Save>.
This is largely cosmetic, but I still find the change undesirable.
The red colour of unwritten links is different from before --
in fact, hard to distinguish from the purple colour of followed links.
(The purple is provided by my browser, of course, but is very common.
This is M$IE 5 for SunOS Unix. Netsacpe 4.5 looks better than this,
but still worse than before.)
BTW, I haven't had any problems with response times --
indeed, <130.94.122.197> is much faster than <www.wikipedia.com>!
-- Toby Bartels
toby(a)math.ucr.edu