Once a company achieves market dominance the only thing left to force a focus on users is its management.
Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
101–110 of 123 posts
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#102Githubs 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.
Yes this shift to React is really annoying. Github also stopped working on older browsers.
My leisure laptop is an older macbook with firefox 78.15.0esr and a little over a year ago I stopped being able to view github files and issue discussions with it. I can still view READMEs most of the time but now I have to use chromium or another computer to actually read code without cloning the repo.
I know they could easily generate JS for older browsers if they cared to set the esbuild target.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#103I suffer it and that’s why I’m building https://githero.app Btw, I worked at GitHub for 3 years and they are very aware that slowness is a big issue throughout the whole product. There was a year long cross team effort to improve things but the main goals were not achieved IMO and it shows.
What do you hope to offer that wouldn't be found in, say, GitLab?
My main goal is to offer a more modern and smoother experience than GitHub, add some features on top of it like push notifications, triage of notifications, a better editing experience,… and integrate the desktop app with your local git
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you hope to offer that wouldn't be found in, say, GitLab?
My main goal is to offer a more modern and smoother experience than GitHub, add some features on top of it like push notifications, triage of notifications, a better editing experience,… and integrate the desktop app with your local git
My point is that there are already many alternatives to GitHub, so you'll want to define your niche a bit better than that.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#105Githubs 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.
There was a video recently talking about this with a good visualization [0] The root cause of the problem is very fundamental to React and the nature of how the team designed the reactivity model. The TL;DR: React has an inverted model of state management [1]. In Vanilla, Vue, Svelte, Solid, any signals-based reactivity model, you explicitly opt-in to state changes by moving code into your reactive callback. In fact,…
Yeah, so you can't blame every performance issue you come across on a single topic, just because you've seen a YouTube video.
If you look at the performance graph, you'll see that most of the time is spent on recalculating css styles. Unfortunately, I can't drill into it because I'm not getting the same problems on my machine. Maybe it has something to do with the 1000s of rendered DOM nodes - no idea, but it has nothing to do with reactivity.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#106[deleted]
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#107Githubs 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.
Everything has been getting worse since the React rewrite(s). Everything is just so much more slower and janky. And things like the "back button" keep acting weird (I reported this several times, after a long delay they fixed it several times, and it just keeps breaking a few weeks later – I've given up). Some of the design decisions are also just baffling, like having "New Issue" in a small modal instead of just a f…
> And things like the "back button" keep acting weird
Ah, good, so it's not just me, then. It's become unpredictable how many steps the back button will take you on GitHub. Or sometimes it'll just take you to a broken, perpetually-loading page. These used to be solved problems on the web.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#108I suffer it and that’s why I’m building https://githero.app Btw, I worked at GitHub for 3 years and they are very aware that slowness is a big issue throughout the whole product. There was a year long cross team effort to improve things but the main goals were not achieved IMO and it shows.
What do you hope to offer that wouldn't be found in, say, GitLab?
GitLab is a completely different platform.
This comes to solve the problem of the terrible UX in the most widespread git service. I won't dare to try to convince my whole team, or company, to migrate to GitLab, but this can be easily adopted.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also as a part of their bullshit React rewrite in addition to making everything much much slower they also managed to break basic functionality like the back and forth buttons on Safari that only got fixed quite recently but for a good 9-12 month period it was impossible to use on iOS. Genuinely whoever was a part of pushing this rewrite should have been fired.
I know you’re just expressing your frustration, but the “the person who did this should be fired” meme you’re propagating is pretty toxic. Decisions like this are never the work of one person, and even when they are, any problems you’re perceiving were traded off against other problems you’re not perceiving. And even if it was an unadulterated mistake, it’s just that… a mistake. Should you get fired for the mistakes you make?
I guess what I’m really saying is that the internet would be a better place if you and others like you dialed down the rhetoric, dialed down the outrage, and dialed up the empathy.
Thanks for listening.
Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a video recently talking about this with a good visualization [0] The root cause of the problem is very fundamental to React and the nature of how the team designed the reactivity model. The TL;DR: React has an inverted model of state management [1]. In Vanilla, Vue, Svelte, Solid, any signals-based reactivity model, you explicitly opt-in to state changes by moving code into your reactive callback. In fact,…
Yeah, so you can't blame every performance issue you come across on a single topic, just because you've seen a YouTube video. If you look at the performance graph, you'll see that most of the time is spent on recalculating css styles. Unfortunately, I can't drill into it because I'm not getting the same problems on my machine. Maybe it has something to do with the 1000s of rendered DOM nodes - no idea, but it has not…
It's not because of the YT video; it's that the YT video provides a good walkthrough. I've been working with JS since the late 90's and have seen various front-end stacks come and go so to me, it is pretty obvious that React has this inverted nature and it is this inverted nature that is the root cause of why it's a very technical endeavor to get it to perform well at scale as it requires the engineer to think carefully about memoization and state placement -- something that doesn't happen in vanilla JS and early frameworks like KnockoutJS.