User blog comment:Sannse/Sneak Peek at the New Look - Your Personal Toolbar/@comment-761251-20100907075158

I have made a floating toolbar at the top for the answers wiki I'm editing on, to hold my personal links, the page controls, and the search box, because on an answers wiki some page controls are in the box at the right, and that's annoying. (Yes, I took the existing HTML and fixed it at the top with css). This does work very well.

I agree that a toolbar at the bottom that has the useful links hidden behind a dropdown (and only the least useful third of them at that) is probably going to be pretty annoying.

There's one reason I would hide all the personal links behind programmed dropdowns, and that's caching. If the stored page contains no user-specific data at all because the browser loads it all later, Wikia can improve page caching and reduce the load on the servers by making our browsers do the work of customizing our page controls for us. (To add article comments that create a lot of load (but save on database size) is a step in the opposite direction, but I'm sure it all makes sense somehow.)