The GitHub website is slow on Safari • Hacker News Board

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#11

Post by PedroBatista » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between.

It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github.

And no, the problem is not "Rails" or [ insert any other tech BS to deflect the real problems ].

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#12

Post by naikrovek » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

This is likely happening in the new Pull Request experience only. If so, it's due to React. This is what happens when you use React for such large pages. "JavaScript is fast!" No, it really isn't. Especially not when you pile abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#13

Post by fleebee » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #2

I've read comments online (here on HN) that Github has been rewriting their UI in React and that it's got slower since. I have no knowledge if this is true or not (ie React -> speed direct correlation), and my own projects are small enough not to see any performance impact. Does anyone have concrete information?

I came across a blog post[1] (HN thread[2]) recently that sheds some light on the issue. The tl;dr is that the PR view can render over 100 000 DOM nodes, many of which are invisible inline SVG nodes, and SPA routing makes navigation a lot slower.

[1]: https://yoyo-code.com/why-is-github-ui-getting-so-much-slowe...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#14

Post by scary-size » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

Noticed a similar slowdown when opening the GCP console in Safari. Especially the BigQuery editor. It's completely unusable.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#15

Post by bob1029 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

PedroBatista wrote: post #11

The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github. And no, the pro…

> And no, the problem is not "Rails"

The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#16

Post by p2detar » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

Yup. I tried to find something in this 120 KB file today on Safari on a M3: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/compiler/fro...

Slow as hell and the Safari search function stopped working. I loaded the same url on Firefox and it was insta-fast.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#17

Post by DrBenCarson » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:20 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #15

PedroBatista wrote: post #11

The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github. And no, the pro…

> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.

Well yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#18

Post by datadrivenangel » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:20 PM UTC

tupac_speedrap wrote: post #6

Unfortunately this is the fate of most modern sites, they start off simple then they start bloating the website with social media and analytics. SV blokes don't care or notice on their $5k+ top of the line laptops but for everyone else it's an issue

Just microsoft sites.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#19

Post by ballenf » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:25 PM UTC

Can someone who's worked in an org this large help me understand how this happens? They surely do testing against major browsers and saw the performance issues before releasing. Is there really someone who gave the green light?

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#20

Post by Roark66 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

PedroBatista wrote: post #11

The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github. And no, the pro…

Yes, I came here to say this exact thing. Also github search sucks bad as well as the way it shows diffs. My current client has just moved from bitbucket to GH and all the devs are up in arms.