[Foundation-l] Usability: page weight

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Forwarded.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Yann Forget <yannfo at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 6:57 AM
> Subject: Usability: page weight
> To: foundation-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org
>
>
> Hello,
>
> While we are talking about usability issues, I would like to mention
> an issue which was not mentioned up to now : page weight.
>
> I am now surfing most of time with a 3G key with a bandwidth of 16
> KB/s maximum, and often less.
> My experience of Wikimedia sites compared with the other websites I am
> using regularly, GMail and Facebook,
> shows that these load much faster than Wikimedia pages, even if the
> page is mostly empty.
> It seems that these sites use some fancy caching for that.
>
> Page weight is a major hurdle for working on any Wikimedia sites
> affecting users who do not enjoy a broadband connection.
> And I believe that small wikis with non-European languages are more
> affected than others (a study would be interesting here).
> For improving outreach of Wikimedia outside of the Western world,
> improving the page weight should be a priority.
>
> What can be done?

I notice that, when comparing logged-in to logged-out page loading
times, the former is almost twice the latter. This appears to be true
whether I refresh the browser cache or not (tested on Main Page).

A light, JavaScript-free skin for low-bandwidth use might be an
intermediate measure.

Magnus