Mobile/Release history

Mobile Web
The mobile web version of Wikipedia makes use of three modes - alpha, beta and stable. Stable mode is the default experience for all users, however users can opt into other modes where they get additional features at the expensive of slightly less stability. Beta is generally bug free or close to bug free and is where we stage features and tweak them to perfection before releasing them to the wild. Our experimental (alpha) mode is as it suggests - very experimental. There are lots more features here and a higher probability of bugs. Developers are encouraged to submit new feature ideas for alpha testing as long as there is no other feature which tries to solve the same problem. Alpha features will be assessed based on user feedback as well as through the use of  EventLogging and the best ones will be moved to beta.

The purpose of this page is to explain what features you can expect in both alpha and beta modes, how long these experiments/projects have been running and who has been working on the code.

Beta

 * Echo notification overlay - view echo notifications without leaving the page (originally introduced by Kaldari)
 * Diffs - show cleaner diffs based on word changes. Originally introduced into alpha in April 2013 by User:jdlrobson
 * Page images in search (originally introduced by Jdlrobson)
 * First time user overlays for upload and edit actions (July 2013 / User:Jdlrobson and User:Kaldari)
 * Navigate here on Nearby ( (begun in June 2013 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Talk page overlay (begun in June 2013 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Tablet styling experiments (begun in November 2012 by User:Jdlrobson)
 * Article preview on nearby (begun in May 2013 by User:jdlrobson)
 * Animations (watch star and CTA, begun by User:JGonera)

Alpha

 * Ajax page loading - added 23rd October 2012. First introduced by User:jdlrobson with input from User:jgonera
 * Next and previous buttons on diff pages. First introduced by User:jdlrobson 28th May 2013.
 * Favourite languages. Prioritise the list of languages with your most widely used ones first. First introduced by User:jdlrobson.
 * Categories - introduced in August 2013 as volunteer patch by Linas Valiukas
 * Image lightboxes - clicking an image will open it up in a full screen lightbox. Introduced by Jgonera in September 2013
 * Nearby pages to this page - an extension of Special:Nearby which takes article geo data and shows other articles near it with you actually not needing to be near it. Introduced in July 2013 by Jdlrobson
 * Microtap - more responsive clicking to elements - introduced by JGonera in August 2013
 * No main page special casing - in stable main pages are special cased. We'd rather they weren't. This provides an environment with additional styles which reduces the need.
 * Last modified link takes user to last diff

Scrapped Experiments
Some experiments don't make it to stable. The following features were dropped from alpha:

Mobile Web Features
Here is a summary of what stable users get.

Wikipedia
See CHANGELOG.