Slower and broken more often, a winning combination!
Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#12Githubs performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.
Were they using vanilla js? That's impressive if yes.
Pretty sure it used to be more server rendered?
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#13The code viewer is completely unusable for any file longer than a hundred lines. I have to clone it and browse locally instead.
It's been like this for at least a year. Does nobody at GH actually use their own website?
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#14Githubs performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.
Were they using vanilla js? That's impressive if yes.
Github was originally written in Ruby on Rails back in 2008. React was released to the public in 2013 (though it was in use at Facebook prior to that.)
If we inspect the source for Github back in 2010 on the Wayback Machine[0], we can see that they were using jQuery like most sites of that time period.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100115102310/http://github.com... (interestingly, elan/plex shows up as a recently updated repo!)
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#15Githubs performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.
Were they using vanilla js? That's impressive if yes.
They were, and still very much are, using web components. But they hired a team to do experiments to imagine the future of GitHub UI, and that team built everything in React. Now that team's work is being ported to the production UI.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#16I’m glad to see my feelings validated. I’m always grumpy about some good, functional software being made worse because there is a big engineering org who has to work on something so they change things and it results in degradation of the software.
I’ve been noticing GitHub’s UI getting sluggish and thought that maybe I’m off my rocker or it was a “my machine” problem, because Github wouldn’t do that… but I guess it’s pretty damn hard to prevent a bunch of devs, managers, and PMs from making changes to prove they should still be employed.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#17Have you used any other Microsoft web services? They’re all slow and terrible
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were they using vanilla js? That's impressive if yes.
They were, and still very much are, using web components. But they hired a team to do experiments to imagine the future of GitHub UI, and that team built everything in React. Now that team's work is being ported to the production UI.
Just use that thing that renders React 1000x faster, million JS or something
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#19Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#20It's also getting a lot flakier. Around October or November of last year I realized that every week I see another bit of SPA jankiness. I lose my scroll position because some component has appeared or disappeared above view. The issues list shows hours-old state and does not refresh. A button doesn't work. A page loads but everything below the header is unstyled. I expand the build details but it collapses closed every time a stage finishes. A filename header appears twice. New comments don't appear. On and on.
It's very frustrating to have a tool that has spent 15 years fading into the background of reliable infrastructure become an intrusive, distracting mess.
After a couple months with jujutsu it's almost completely replaced my use of git. It’s a lot to hope for, but just as jujutsu surveyed a couple decades of VCS to syncretize a huge improvement, I do hope someone will do the same for collaborating with jujutsu. GitHub PRs feel very unfortunately frozen in amber because their popularity makes it very hard to fix the core UI design problems it has with multiple tabs, incoherent timeline, edited commits, missing "8 more comments", and now a steady drip of SPA jank.
The big remaining feature of GitHub is the network effect of coworkers and potential contributors already being logged in, and there could be a race between a competitor neutralizing that with bidirectional sync (see git-bug) and GitHub getting their usability problems sorted. Microsoft's legendary resistance to breaking changes means there's a very big window available.