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The GitHub website is slow on Safari

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Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#151

This thread has really opened my eyes to how much the world hates react developers, I am one. Unrealistic timelines, implementing what should be backend logic in frontend, there's a bunch of ways SPA's tend to be a trap. Was react a bad idea? Can anyone point to a single well made react app?

React feels like magic the first time you try it, specially if you don't have any experience with JSX. Then you need to prop drill and you regret everything.

The main problem is that it tries to do away with a view model layer so you can get the data and render it directly in the components, but that makes managing multiple components from a high level perspective literally impossible. Instead of one view model, you end up with 50 React-esque utilities to achieve the same result.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#152
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the most common complaint against Slack that it's not optimized enough for what it does ? That's how I read the rants against its electron app, and people are already choosing the electron app against using it straight in the browser (as they'd do for Gmail or Calendar for instance)

Slack is one the most slick and pleasant pieces of software to use. It's big success as well as the fact that it's acquisition cost was one of the largest software deals ever – tells of itself – it's certainly a fine piece of software made by fine engineers who used react and electron with a certain amount of dignity. People who rant about tools like react or electron affecting their performance just don't want to un…

I'd make an argument about the need for Slack to go beyond.

As you point out it's wildly successful and is the backbone of many groups internal communication. Many companies would just stop working without Slack, that's a testament to the current team's efforts, but also something that critical would merit better perfs.

I'd make the comparison with Figma, which went the extra mile to bring a level of smoothness that just wouldn't be there otherwise.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#153
post #5

Improvements merged within the last two days by the WebKit team: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170922#discuss... For my sins I occasionally create large PRs (> 1,000 files) in GitHub, and teammates (who mostly all use Chrome) will sometimes say "I'll approve once it loads for me..."

Interesting how _everyone_ here blames JS and React, yet the fixes you linked are about CSS performance.

Confirmation of priors is a powerful drug. And performance engineering is really hard and often lives at a different layer of the stack than the one you know.

It's just easier to blame the tools (or companies!) you already hate.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.

I'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?

That's a good question, without looking into any of the code id say bandwidth cost goes higher when moving away from server side rendering since you have to send the code for client side rending to each client which connects.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#155
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Apple is also the one locking Safari to the OS, IE style. Having to buy a new machine to get the latest and secure version of a browser is a pretty heavy requirement.

or use a supported OS (linux, or hilariously probably Windows), or install a still-suppored browser (I'd guess Firefox likely still runs latest on there). I'd put it on the end user for not updating software on 15 y/o hardware and still expecting the outside world to interact cleanly.

> hilariously probably Windows

That's probably true.

> 15 y/0

It's a matter of expectations, many laptops that old still work decently enough with a refreshed battery. Funnily enough win10 was released 15 ago, and one can still get support for it for at least another 3 years until 2028, even on the customer license.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#156
post #15

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.

> The problem is they abandoned rails for react.

Which, it seems, was a result of the M$ acquisition: https://muan.co/posts/javascript

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#157
post #19

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?

The answer is enshittification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#158

GitHub moved to a JavaScript rendering mode almost as soon as Microsoft bought it. Previously, I had been able to browse it with JavaScript disabled on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13. So even if I enable JavaScript, I can no longer browse GitHub, because they didn't bother to make their build compatible with browser versions as old as mine. It's hard to know which member of…

Couldn’t you install Chrome or Firefox?

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#159
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We were very few to rant about it, 1 year ago: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 Their "solution" was to enable SSR for us ranters' accounts.

This is actually unreal. Wow.

Re: The GitHub website is slow on Safari

#160
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should have said pre-react. I don't know what GitHub did specifically, but several years ago it used to be reasonably fast and relatively pleasant to use. It regressed a lot over the last few years, seemingly correlated with attempts at interactive features.

It used to be jQuery + PJAX

More recently - and still - it was web components. React is gradually creeping in.
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