We updated our site today and have agreement from everybody I’ve talked to thus far that this is a hindrance, not a boon, to browsing on mobile.
Knowing what topic you are currently viewing is a problem I personally have never had, and I have been using Discourse daily for almost two years now. The addition of this largely unhelpful information in place of genuinely useful features is a decision I honestly cannot comprehend. Blocking the hamburger itself is a bit of a pain, blocking the user icon is worse, and blocking the search feature makes using the forum as we do on a daily basis feel more like a chore than it should ever need to. These work fine on a computer, where no functionality is replaced, but on mobile they just add an unnecessary step that completely breaks the flow of navigation.
Forcing users to scroll up slightly to be able to access these features or return to the home page is something that, at the very least, needs to be able to be disabled both globally, on mobile, and also per user. It makes the act of navigating between pages feel clunky where it should be elegant, and was up until today. Please, please, please let us disable this.