The [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Design/Interlanguage_links | Compact language switcher ]] currently in beta on desktop uses the [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector | Universal language selector ]] to suggest and then allow users to browse languages in which an article is available. They are currently looking at rolling out Compact language switcher on stable and it calls into question whether or not we should be using the same tool on mobile web.
From a user perspective, there is not much advantage to switching the mobile web to it, but there might be gains from an engineering perspective that are worth investigating. Some elements to consider:
- I don't know if it works on mobile out of the box
- it currently doesn't support using the keyboard setting
- it currently suggests 9 languages, when possible (on mobile web, we definitely want fewer)
- it doesn't include translated article title
What are the user benefits?
- the best part feature search (and I believe that this is done via a separate api call)
- ordering by geo might make sense when the language list is long > 50