Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:52:42 UTC
I'm the Product Manager responsible for the Android Browser and during some recent testing of how top sites perform we've noticed a peculiarity with Wikipedia which means some users don't get the best experience on Android devices. I think there's a way to fix this, which I hope won't be too difficult or onerous to implement. A quick example - let's consider the article at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA When a user visits that URL on an Android phone they are automatically served the mobile version - that's the good news. The problem arises, however, when such a user clicks to "View on regular wikipedia" - the regular wikipedia page is poorly formatted on the screen. This isn't anything to do the content you serve (which is just fine) - it's caused by the .m. in the hostname and down to a workaround we added to the browser some time ago. Previous versions of the Android browser included logic designed to control the viewport for pages served from what looked like mobile-specific domains (e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org - we take the .m. to signify mobile) by forcing it to be the same as the width of the device's screen. This means that when an Android device receives desktop-style HTML from an m.blah.net host (for example), even though the browser can render it, our workaround kicks in and the result is almost always a poorly-formatted page for the user. Although we plan to remove this logic from the next Android release there are still many millions of Android-using Wikipedia fans who would get a better experience if Wikipedia were to only serve desktop pages from en.wikipedia.org rather than from (e.g.) en.m.wikipedia.org. We would really appreciate you considering and implementing this change to improve the user experience of Wikipedia on Android devices. If you have any questions, or if anything in my mail is unclear, please don't hesitate to contact me.
This should now be fixed in r98427.
