Topic on Talk:Talk pages project

Just a heads-up to anyone who might find a different appearance on their talk pages:

As announced at w:fr:Wikipédia:Le Bistro/2 juillet 2020, the Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements project is planning to implement a fixed width screen size. This kind of change always takes a few days to get used to, and there's some research behind it, but if it's just not working for you, then @SGrabarczuk (WMF) has promised me that there will be a way to opt out of this via preferences. If you have questions, suggestions for a different default width, etc., then please go to mw:Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements.

To be clear, this is only going to be enabled by default for certain "early adopter" wikis: Basque/French/Hebrew/Persian Wikipedias, French Wiktionary, and Portuguese Wikiversity.

That's right. A link to opt-out easily will also be available in the sidebar, and this will be useful for the communities of the abovementioned wikis. For the vast majority of wikis, one will be able to opt-in individually via preferences.

Probably better to call it max-width rather than fixed-width. Anyone who remembers the bad old days of truly fixed width web pages that you had to scroll from side to side as you read across the lines on a small screen would have a conniption if they thought MediaWiki was going down that route.