Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#51

Post by weberer »

warkanlock wrote: post #3

Honest question and no pun intended: I don't understand people's desire to prevent JavaScript from being a language that runs in the browser. Could someone shed some light on this?

Try disabling Javascript and browsing the web. On the sites that work, its a lot nicer. No cookie pop-ups, no auto-playing videos that chase you as you scroll down, no random pop-ups asking you to sign up for a newsletter. No browser fingerprinting to sell my behavior to advertisers or worse. Just no more dirty tricks in general. Unfortunately, these dirty tricks are how companies make money, so they have an incentive to make websites not work for users with Javascript disabled.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#52

Post by chx »

mcluck wrote: post #46
chx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not fine, there's absolutely no need whatsoever for Github to be an SPA. What functionality do you think can't be done ... in HTML 4.0 for that matter much less HTML5? Sure, a good editor inside the browser but then let that be a standalone, that has nothing to do with the repository viewer. (As an aside I hate the Jira UI for being the same.)

I agree but I'll take it a step further. I actually rather dislike the in-browser editor when I'm just browsing code. It messes with my standard keybindings and has weird focus issues. Give me plain, syntax highlighted text, with optional symbol referencing to make it easier to look around. If I get to the point that I want a real text editor, I'll just clone it

That's what I meant by standalone indeed.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#53

Post by dijit »

_andrei_ wrote: post #48
dijit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your stance then; sure: it's no longer a conversation. It is then completely unacceptable to force people to run code on their machines. Thus JS should always be optional. Perhaps this is not the result you intended by attempting to shut down any opinions; but now we can't talk about it. So it's concluded.

they don't force you to visit their website, your visit there IS optional

This is disingenuous to the point of being insulting.

Their modus operandi is to be the social-development hub of as many projects as they can, and they are successful.

Their platform has lock-in and network effects that you must acknowledge, often being the only bug-tracker available, only mechanism to submit patches and often being the only source of truth for a given repository of code.

Unless you're going to tell me that a private company can do what it likes, in which case I will reignite efforts to put FOSS on FOSS platforms. If Github wants to hold it's market position (made precarious based on their owners and fact that it's backend is closed-source) then they will have to keep good-will.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#54

Post by eviks »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #10

At the end of the day GitHub is a web app. I don’t think it’s worth complaining about unless it’s something like Wikipedia that stops working.

At the end of the day GitHub is a website that displays some text, so it's fine complaining about losing that basic functionality

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#55

Post by [deleted] »

abricq wrote: post #32
Argonaut998 wrote: post #10

At the end of the day GitHub is a web app. I don’t think it’s worth complaining about unless it’s something like Wikipedia that stops working.

For sure as of today GitHub is a web app, but it's questionable whether it should forces you to use it as one. In essence, GitHub is just a remote server for a .git folder. This does not need any JS. I see that GitHub now tries to become at the same time a social media for hacker-friendly people and some sort of super-CI server with automation. For sure these are good features. However I also see why people are sad t…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#56

Post by greenie_beans »

notpushkin wrote: post #26
greenie_beans wrote: post #15

that is totally unsurprising, i would use javascript to build github too. why is this on the front page?

Because it used to work without JS, but more importantly because it used to work better without JS – stuff loaded more quickly and the overall experience felt snappier. Not sure if it is front page worthy but it is still sad.

ah okay that's fair then.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#57

Post by foul »

If you don't care about issues or wikis, it's now time to create a habit for using the command line (or the dillo plugin which automates this process):

  dir=$(mktemp -d)
  git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git $dir
  cd $dir
  git ls-tree -r HEAD
  git checkout HEAD -- README.md ; less README.md
  # etc.
  # if you just wished to take a gander at the repo...
  cd
  rm -rf $dir
Yeah if you don't have a *nix-something it'd be harder, yeah you must have some spare space but usually the git bare repo shallow-cloned (downloaded only the latest revision) is under 1MB. Whatever.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#58

Post by byyll »

araes wrote: post #40
vallode wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript itself is not usually the problem (aside from certain fundemental issues). The computational gap between a developer on a M3 Macbook and a person on a used Dell from 2008 is already quite large, meaning what feels "snappy" and "responsive" to the former can feel "sluggish" and "annoying" to the latter. The other factor between the two people can be network speed, many areas of the world have access to extr…

The websites are also written badly, and appear to optimize being written badly, because of their lack of goal alignment with users. If you do a View Source on Reuters.com main landing page, it's script file is a single line that's 1,300,000 characters long. And every time you land on a page it tries to dump 1,300,000 characters of script on you (on top of the multi-MB videos it auto-loads) [and the pop-ups] Most maj…

You didn't ask for it but might find it useful: https://neuters.de

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#59

Post by unclenoriega »

byyll wrote: post #58
araes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The websites are also written badly, and appear to optimize being written badly, because of their lack of goal alignment with users. If you do a View Source on Reuters.com main landing page, it's script file is a single line that's 1,300,000 characters long. And every time you land on a page it tries to dump 1,300,000 characters of script on you (on top of the multi-MB videos it auto-loads) [and the pop-ups] Most maj…

You didn't ask for it but might find it useful: https://neuters.de

Also, https://text.npr.org/

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#60

Post by hexagonwin »

They changed something recently, now I'm no longer able to browse Github using their web based file viewer for both individual files and directories using my SeaMonkey 2.53.18.1[0], released just 9 days ago. Sure they might be missing a few JavaScript features compared to mainstream ones like Firefox or Chrome but not that much..

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/NZnW88v/Github.png

Post reply on HN