Usability Beta Enhancements

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New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs
New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs

Thanks for trying out the usability beta. Close to 280,000 people tried out the usability beta and about 220,000 people continue using it. One of the most-frequently reported frustration about the beta was that (1) watch/unwatch was hidden under the drop-down menu and (2) tabs overlaps when the browser is scaled down or the resolution is low. Tab issues were more significant for language communities whose words tend to be long such as German. We are also simplifying the search box to simplify the interface and in order to minimize the overlapping side-effect. Those new features are currently staged on the prototype wikis in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, Russian, and Sinhala. You need to log-in in order to see watch/unwatch tabs. The screenshot on the right is the shot when the browser window is scaled down to 640×480. “View History” is moved to drop down menu in order to keep “Read” and “Edit” tabs visible. Let us know your feedback here.
Naoko Komura, Project Manager, Usability Initiative
Update on November 18th: Thank you for your support and feedback. These features are now available in the usability beta across all Wikimedia projects.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Moving the tabs into the drop down menu is a very clever solution. How would that be done? JavaScript?

Yup. It is done by JavaScript.

Naoko, the new watch/unwatch tab is great! I love it, Frank

Thats awesome. Just curious, is there an easy way to make drop-down menus from the drop down, for stuff added by user javascript? (aka a sub-drop down menu).

@bawolff – Sounds like you’re asking for nested drop down menus. We weren’t planning on any cases where we’d need nested drop downs so there’s currently no code in place for them.