On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 6:29 AM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
*But*, that only works on the normal website. On the mobile website, I cant figure out how to disable the Media Viewer. To check I wasnt missing something, I asked someone at the Wikimedia Indonesia office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Beeyan) to try to disable it on his phone, and he couldnt work it out either.
Go to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_Protection_Act_of_1970
Scroll down to the "Tennessee Walking Horse" photo and click on it. As far as I can see it has downloaded the 200+KB photo, and I may either close the MediaViewer or go to the page on Commons. There are no other options. We can't figure out how to disable this. Even after logging in on the mobile site, there is no preference to disable it in the Settings.
If you click the Details button to return to go to Commons, only a 70KB photo is shown, which is what used to occur.
Hi all,
A few points of clarification on MediaViewer and mobile. The Mobile Web team built a custom image-viewing experience for users accessing Wikimedia projects on phones and tablets; we're not actually using desktop MediaViewer. The mobile implementation loads a size of the image adapted for the viewport (which may be larger than the screen size due to retina support). It does not load the full-size image unless that image is very small. Users accessing the mobile site via Wikipedia Zero or from lower-end no-JS phones/browsers go straight to the file page.
Performance and bandwidth are definitely things we think about a lot. The Zero team is currently experimenting with different thumbnail compression ratios for mobile users who access the site via Wikipedia Zero carriers, in order to keep bandwidth impact minimal. Based on the outcome, we're considering using extra compression in the mobile media viewing experience for all users, though we'll need to study the caching implications, because it could potentially make performance worse but bandwidth better.
Making sure the default experience works well for both high-end and low-end device users is a much higher priority on mobile than creating layers of opt-in/out preferences, because people use mobile differently from laptops/computers and complex preference screens are difficult to navigate on a smaller device. We do already have a preference to turn images off entirely on the mobile site for users who want to save bandwidth; adding more granular options to this is not something we're considering at this time, though it's entirely possible that we may revisit this in the future.