It's strange that I can't find a bug for this. Lots of user on en.wiki complained loudly about this [1], but nobody succeded to write a bug report for it? Well, here it is:
Please provide an option in user preferences to turn VE off. Some users just don't like it and don't want to have an extra tab which they don't use anyway. The gadget isn't perfect, as the tab might appear for short time before it is removed again, and has to updated when VE integration changes. The only reason I found for why there is no such option is this:
"It was planned, but the code turned out to be seriously buggy at the last minute. Getting it really, truly off (rather than just covered up) is more complicated than expected." Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:32, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Now with the minimized amount of code that is loaded at startup, it is acceptable to load the code, but just not to execute it. Adding
if ( !mw.user.options.get( 'visualeditor-enable' ) ) {
return;
}
near to the end of modules/ve-mw/init/targets/ve.init.mw.ViewPageTarget.init.js should be all that's really needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vpt#.22Opt_out.22_of_VE_needed_under_preferences
Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: enhancement
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vpt#.22Opt_out.22_of_VE_needed_under_preferences
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52086
