Last modified: 2014-09-04 22:39:03 UTC
It would be useful to have a preference (or preferences) to specify whether it's a high or low bandwidth connection. Potentially, there could be multiple variations, not just on or off. This could be auto-detected, with an option to manually override it. The goal would be to allow scripts and/or ResourceLoader to detect this and behave accordingly. Thus, instead of simply having "JS on" or "JS off", there could also be "JS with high bandwidth" vs. "JS with low bandwidth" with different behavior and/or additional scripts being loaded.
I know this is not about testing for developers but about user experience but for testing, Nemo_bis mentioned http://lartc.org/manpages/tc.html on wikitech-l a while ago.
JS on/off (where off=blacklisted, not per se the browser/user turning it off themselves), and mobile both have their separation. What kind of things would low-bandwidth change? Anything in particular you can think of? I'm not sure we can justify and would have net-benefit from fragmenting this within the platform at the ResourceLoader level. We could potentially have a low-bandwidth optimised skin and forward requests to that for browsers, users, geo location, or other factor that we consider low-bandwidth (like we do with mobile).
I think the idea would be to allow JavaScript features that use minimal requests and bandwidth (e.g. watchlist star), while disabling more bandwidth heavy ones (things that use more bandwidth to provide an app-like experience). This should be low priority for now (as it is), just something to think about.
