When opening a long page with long list of language links, the page load may take long, so the language links appear as non compact for few seconds and only when the page load ends, there is blanking and it becomes compact.
This should ideally be fixed by compacting the language links before page load. Alternative solution could be using smooth animation (such as fade out affect) for hiding the long language links
This is not new issue, but I just find it annoying sometimes.
Thanks for filing this bug. It belongs together with other performance related tasks:
There are couple of reasons why I believe the flash, while annoying, does not need immediate action:
As far as I can see, the only way this could be completely fixed would be to do things on the PHP side. This brings its own set of issues and would need significant amount of engineering and even operations work to avoid issues with caching. We definitely do not want to delay the time to first paint, so the script gets executed after it on document.ready event and I don't see a way to make it happen earlier on the client side either.
I will leave the suggestion whether a transition animation would help to someone more experienced in design.
Change 299285 had a related patch set uploaded (by Eranroz):
Earlier evaluation of compactlinks
There is a very long delay between the execution of $( document ).ready and document getting to interactive state - which is enough for compacting the language links. This delay is most noticeable if there are images on the page.
I don't know if this delay is so noticeable in more recent versions of jQuery but I don't want dependency to T124742 which unfortunately may take years to be done
Change 304774 had a related patch set uploaded (by Nikerabbit):
Earlier evaluation of suggestions in the sidebar
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/304774/ would be good to have in the same train as the already merged patch.
Change 304774 merged by jenkins-bot:
Earlier evaluation of suggestions in the sidebar
I am noticing that the language change tooltip is sometimes mispositioned. Is anyone else seeing this? Cause is likely this patch or the conversion to OO.ui.PopupWidget.