User:Pelagic/Incubator/Essay – Why I still use desktop view instead of mobile
The 2010 wikitext editor edit
Desktop has it, mobile doesn’t. Many of the reasons for "desktop is better" are actually "old editor is better" issues. Perhaps Why I still use wikitext 2010 editor should be a separate essay.
Talk pages edit
Mobile has an alternate talk page view that just shows topic headings. You click into each discussion separately.
Previews edit
Why use desktop view or "read as wiki page" instead? Because in edit-section mode I can preview my post before publishing it. In reply-mode there is only the Publish button.
In-and-out edit
Also, if the page has a lot of small sections, I can see them at once without tapping back and forth into each one.
On the other hand, some talk pages are h u g e. It would be nice to selectively load just the sections I’m interested in. Perhaps there could be a size threshold where small topics are preloaded inline and large topics aren’t.
Improving the topic list edit
What would make the topics list really shine would be for it to show size (bytes, words, whatever), number of posts, and maybe even number of people, created date, last active date for each topic before loading it. That info could be parsed at save-time and stored in a separate table, it needn’t be re-parsed at each load. If the topic list has its own render–cache–purge facility, then maybe that doesn’t matter. But a separate table of topics would allow some cool searching and filtering options.
(Aside: couldn’t we do this for collapsible headings too? "Section title [xxxx words, xx subsections] ✏️ 🔽".)
Download size edit
To-do: investigate download size using a desktop browser.
Archives edit
In desktop view, I can see that there is a discussion archive and even search it. In mobile view, there isn’t even an indication whether an archive is present.
Whole-page and section editing edit
On desktop, I can choose to edit the wikitext of the whole page as well as per-section or the top section.
Revision history and diffs edit
edit
On desktop, I can return to the current version of the page from the revision history list.
In AMC I have to tap into a specific revision or diff to get a link to the current version. Non-AMC revision list is okay in this respect.
Mode selectors edit
On desktop, pages have a row of selectors for page, talk, read, edit, history, etc. that are consistent across modes. Sure, the tab-like appearance in Vector is counter-intuitive, but you get used to it. The underlined selectors in Timeless are more self-evident.
AMC added a toolbar row for page, previous-version, and (now?) both talk views, but the selectors aren't present in history or diff. (Query was it added for talk recently? Dec 2019)
For non-AMC mobile, you used to need to swipe all the way to the bottom of the page to access discussion or history. As at Dec 2019, it appears they have enabled AMC toolbar for all mobile users on en-wp?
Search edit
In desktop view, I can access selectors to choose which namespaces to search. This is vital to find help on how to do stuff (Help:, Template:) or to find discussions across multiple talk namespaces.
Sure, it's a bit clunky. Starting with the on-page search box, I have to do a null search to get to Special:Search. It would be good if there was a "more options" link in the drop-down.
On mobile I can hand-type Help:searchterm, but the results are more limited. I haven't discovered a way to search multiple namespaces, and Special:Search isn't useful.