[Mediawiki-l] Ending the "1 request per browser" limit? (technical)

[Daniel Barrett]

Is there any way to disable MediaWiki's limitation of "one active request per browser instance"?

In our MediaWiki site, the #1 source of user confusion (by far) is this limit.  When a user encounters a slow wiki page and clicks the browser "Stop"  button, the user now cannot view any other wiki pages in that browser window, because the previous request hasn't completed. As a result, the user believes the wiki has crashed and files a support ticket.

Now, the user can simply close and reopen the browser to get a new session cookie, but in practical terms, many end-users don't know this. And even when they DO know it, they believe this behavior is a MediaWiki bug, which breeds distrust of the system, and costs us more time explaining why it isn't a bug.

Why do we have slow-rendering wiki articles? Because some of them, by design, retrieve data from external systems. These retrievals can legitimately take 10 seconds or longer, and they provide VERY high business value so they're not going away.  We tried making the requests asynchronous, using AJAX, but this does not avoid the limit.

So, what is the appropriate way to disable the "one request per browser" limitation?  We are not worried about individual users abusing the system with multiple requests: this is a private wiki within a corporation.

Thanks,
DanB