I see that performance improvements have been a major initiative this quarter.
What efforts, if any, have been devoted to improving loading and other performance of our current primary editor? Or has the WMF neglected our current primary tools, and comparing an optimized 2017Editor to an unoptimized current wikitext editor?
We made some improvements to the loading of WikiEditor, mostly removing old unused code – workarounds for browsers we no longer support, and remains of long-disabled editor experiments from 2010.
When it comes to loading performance, the slowest thing about the "old" wikitext editor is that you have to reload the whole page to open it. (This applies both to WikiEditor, and the super-old "core" editing toolbar, see Editor for reference.) Unfortunately, this is not really something we can change, as it would break countless gadgets and user scripts that run only once after the page loads and see if the editor is open, and make a lot of people very angry at us.
I don't think there's much we can do about loading speed of WikiEditor. Apart from this big problem, it is already fast.
