Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:32 UTC
1) The search box on the main page should be displayed FIRST for cell phone users. IT is currently displayed LAST. Not only is it very inconvenient to scroll to the bottom of the page, but some older cell phones could take 10 minutes to load all the different pages of text before they make it to the bottom. (I tried the 'jump to search' feature but it didn't do anything on my OpenWave browser) 2) If wikipedia does not already detect that a user is using a cellphone browser (such as openwave) then it should send the user their requested pages in a more cellphone-friendly format. (Google.com does this very well)
"Jump to search" will work provided that the search box has actually loaded. Since it comes near the end of the source, that may take a while on slow connections. Possibly move the navigation bar to the top of the source for the main page? That would probably break all kinds of things, though, rendering the main page differently, and people would want it for portals and stuff too. The search box definitely can't be moved to the top by itself without either moving the entire navigation bar or breaking the current layout, and both appear unacceptable. So I don't see a solution short of UA sniffing, which would require a reliable list of mobile UA strings. Googling a bit gives http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ and http://delicon.sourceforge.net/ as starting points for that, which needs to be done anyway to get good display on non-CSS-compliant handhelds. Once someone writes up code that will sniff out at least common handhelds, then we can discuss how to handle the search box for them. (And Rob, this bug is search-specific. Bug 1882 is a more general one.)
There are third-party solutions for this.
