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Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

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Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#111

Post by sexy_seedbox »

srhtftw wrote: post #102
xPaw wrote: post #4

Githubs 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…

Pretty much all of Microsoft — Admin Center, Entra, Defender, etc, they all load slowly and then show you more "silver shimmers effects".

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#112

Post by gimenete »

zahlman wrote: post #104
gimenete wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not an alternative to GitHub but an alternative frontend. The backend is still GitHub.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#114

Post by jmrm »

xPaw wrote: post #4

Githubs 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.

Even tech influencers who love React, like Theo Browne, has heavily criticise how bad is made GitHub in that regard.

IIRC they set the diff page to update entirely every reactive element in the page when some of this element change, instead of that one.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#115

Post by krembanan »

richwater wrote: post #46
timw4mail wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can? I haven't seen them.

You can indeed do so, but it requires a skillset way behind new grads, bootcamps and giving up the prevailing leadership mantra of "All engineers are fungible so just throw that random team over to learn React and it'll be fine". Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG and so you see a lot of FEEs want to transition. Not much senior talent gets kept in…

> Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG

Not in my experience for the last 5 years, looking at two job ads and comparing the salary range, they are usually the same. Which FAANG still does this?

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#116

Post by B56b »

mintplant wrote: post #107
arp242 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It breaks so often in SPAs. Turns out that making the client-side code responsible for routing leads to a ton of fragility.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#117

Post by amluto »

whalesalad wrote: post #74
DanOpcode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all years of advancement in computing, and in the year 2025 it's not possible to show a 5000 lines diff anymore.

I just mean that if you are reviewing over 5k lines of code, it suggests your PR is too big and should have been broken up into smaller changes.

If someone is adding a 5k-line file, I would usually rather review it as a single chunk. And yes, sometimes a 5k-line file is entirely justified.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#118

Post by amluto »

Delgan wrote: post #54
xPaw wrote: post #4

Githubs 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.

I was baffled by the technical blog post they published on this subject, in 2023: https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/cr... They completely redesigned the code navigation to load it dynamically using React. One of the regressions introduced caused the entries to be duplicated when searching for a word using Ctrl+F. Their solution to address this issue? Decompose the source character by character…

Wow, that post is amazing. They observed that their page worked poorly because it had a lot of DOM nodes, and they don’t even discuss the idea of trying to make a usable page with fewer DOM nodes. Instead they add all manner of complexity and more nodes (!) to make it sort of work.

A web browser can render and search a boring pure-HTML syntax-highlighted source file just fine.

Re: Why is GitHub UI getting slower?

#119

Post by chrisbrandow »

I'm so glad someone documented this. it's been driving me crazy. I was just in a serious crunch mode for a couple of week, so all kinds of minor speed bumps in my workflow have become really evident to me. The UI transition between PR "tabs" has been one of the worst.
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