- Logged-out or logged-in, Vector skin, run localStorage.clear() from console to ensure a clean slate, although it happens without it as well.
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki?safemode=on
This includes the full editor code that normally loads only when you click Edit on an article, or Reply on a talk page. Including the ~200kB ext.visualEditor.core module.
The main problem is that MediaWiki as a software is hard to promise as performing well at scale when our main landing page loads 1.7MB of unused JavaScript.
I assume that the root cause here is the wider issue with wgExtraSignatureNamespaces and how DT lacks a more precise (yet sufficiently confident) signal for loading itself on wikis that have (some) discussion pages in the main space. In other words, this isn't representative of how MediaWiki or DiscussionTools affect Wikipedia or other "normal" wikis, because we happen to enable this on mediawiki.org in an unusual way.
Having said that, we probably shouldn't load the entirety of VE passively on real talk pages, either! But I suppose we can at least defer it to the point in the code where it has determined there are real comment threads on the page, with a working Reply link. In the case of the Main Page there are no comment threads, and when logged-out, also no permission to edit.