[jaywee]

Yeah, I had to create a user on many language versions just to keep the old skin. I fail to see a point in wasting 2/3 of my screen estate to whitespace.

[hayleox]

The problem with unbounded page width is that the content often didn't work well that wide. I use a 1440p monitor and on the old theme, paragraphs were often a bit too wide to read comfortably. As a Wikipedia editor, it was also very often a challenge when writing articles – it's difficult to make your placement of images and tables and so forth look decent on viewports anywhere from ~400px to >2000px wide.

All that said, the new theme does allow you to return to wide mode -- on any page on the site, there's an Appearance options panel in the rightmost column where you can switch from Standard to Wide.

[mzajc]

I'm in the same boat. I think it's unfortunate that MediaWiki doesn't accept a theme header or cookie, which would be very easy to set with extensions. User sessions don't persist for very long and don't work in private browsing mode, while the querysring useskin= parameter is annoying to work with and isn't applied to hyperlinks.

[labster]

People creating an account just to browse isn’t great for the WMF either. You don’t get the pages cached by Varnish and hit the Mediawiki servers directly. There’s still parser cache, but it’s still more load while logged in.

[bawolff]

In theory user sessions are supposed to persist for a year, although it seems there have been issues recently.