[Foundation-l] Usability: page weight

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

2010/6/15 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com>:
>>
>> 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

It seems Gmail and Facebook use a lot of Javascript, isn't it?

Yann