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.
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 full-screen page (only if you have templates set for some reason). Having less than half the screen being used is not helpful, and only going to reduce the quality of reported issues because it's just shit UX. Baffling. I genuinely wonder if the people designing/building this have ever used GitHub themselves (they reverted some of the other misguided "how on earth did you think that was a good idea?!" features, but not this one).
I have so many more gripes and bugs; clicking "show raw" generally works better for viewing code (or just cloning locally). It's just embarrassing. But it's all pointless to report because nothing gets fixed and it all just keeps getting worse.
GitLab was a "GitHub clone", but I guess now GitHub is turning in a "GitLab clone" by making everything a slow janky barely working mess.
> 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.
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, assigning each individual character its own distinct HTML node...
Needless to say, in addition to abysmal performance (it took seconds to display on my laptop), this also caused new problems (such as the inability to search for certain composite emojis). The worst part is that they seemed proud of their hack, since they wrote a blog post about it.
Trying to find a string in github actions logs is just impossible. Not to mention that even opening large logs takes many seconds of animated scrolling to get to the end.
There is the "view raw logs" button which just opens a plaintext file that my browser loads and searches instantly (imagine that), but doesn't work for still-running jobs.
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.
I particularly appreciate when the diff is the addition of a new file and it still takes forever to compute a diff or whatever it’s doing behind the scenes.
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, in almost all of the code that you write, you typically explicitly opt-in to changes in state.
In React, you explicitly opt-out of state changes by moving code out of the reactive callback because the entire component function is the reactive callback (so any state in the path of that function that should not trigger a re-render has to be moved out via a hook).
This fundamental difference is what makes React hard to do well at scale because one needs to be very cognizant of where to place state inside a component and how to optimize for performance with memoization [2] (something Vue and Svelte developers pretty much never think about). The React team spent 2 years building the compiler to automatically manage memoization, but from the benchmarks I've seen, it's hardly made a difference.
In that time frame, Vue has been working on "Vapor Mode" [3] which bypasses the VDOM and brings it to parity with Svelte, Solid, and very close to Vanilla while still retaining a very easy to grok model of reactivity.
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.
Interesting to contrast that with the assessment of React, qua critique of the Observer pattern in Brandon Rhodes' 2022 design patterns talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGq7Cr2ekVM?t=28m45s . (Notably, later in the talk when he describes the Mediator pattern with a GUI-motivated example, he preempts by saying "I know I just told you to use React"... but then the description ends up sounding to me very much as if React is an implementation of the Mediator pattern!)
They used mostly vanilla JS for over a decade. They were early proponents of a technique they called PJAX which is actually pretty similar to how HTMX works: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax
My hunch is that over time it became harder and harder for them to hire new frontend developers who didn't insist on building everything new in React and eventually they gave up.
Github was originally written in Ruby on Rails back in 2008. React was released to the public in 2013 (though it was in use at Facebook prior to that.)
If we inspect the source for Github back in 2010 on the Wayback Machine[0], we can see that they were using jQuery like most sites of that time period.
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.
Sometimes things already don't work. For example recently, I used Firefox and couldn't create an organization. It would just hang, when I clicked the green button to create it. Not sure how they could mess that one up, but when I used Chromium, it worked. It should be as simple as sending a form, but somehow they f'ed that up.
Don't forget many of those very junior developers they've unleashed on the front end is GitHub Copilot. Vibe coding is the new GitHub mandate, because they are serious about dogfooding.
It's also getting a lot flakier. Around October or November of last year I realized that every week I see another bit of SPA jankiness. I lose my scroll position because some component has appeared or disappeared above view. The issues list shows hours-old state and does not refresh. A button doesn't work. A page loads but everything below the header is unstyled. I expand the build details but it collapses closed every time a stage finishes. A filename header appears twice. New comments don't appear. On and on.
It's very frustrating to have a tool that has spent 15 years fading into the background of reliable infrastructure become an intrusive, distracting mess.
After a couple months with jujutsu it's almost completely replaced my use of git. It’s a lot to hope for, but just as jujutsu surveyed a couple decades of VCS to syncretize a huge improvement, I do hope someone will do the same for collaborating with jujutsu. GitHub PRs feel very unfortunately frozen in amber because their popularity makes it very hard to fix the core UI design problems it has with multiple tabs, incoherent timeline, edited commits, missing "8 more comments", and now a steady drip of SPA jank.
The big remaining feature of GitHub is the network effect of coworkers and potential contributors already being logged in, and there could be a race between a competitor neutralizing that with bidirectional sync (see git-bug) and GitHub getting their usability problems sorted. Microsoft's legendary resistance to breaking changes means there's a very big window available.
My favourite github UIUX snafu is being unable to navigate back to the root repo page when I'm in some sort of complex view, or being able to go to the authors profile in less than like 5 clicks.
Re going to author's profile, I usually just give up, and go to the URL to fix the address.
You'd think clicking on author's name in commit log view would bring you to their profile — social coding, after all — yet it simply filters the log by author.
Just checked, apparently, they do have a tooltip popup in "Commits" log view to go directly to the author, but who has the time to wait 1s until the tooltip's appearance? Clicking on the name simply filters commits by the author, clicking again, just reloads the same page you're already on — but, hey, at least they didn't break the URL addresses yet!
I’m glad to see my feelings validated. I’m always grumpy about some good, functional software being made worse because there is a big engineering org who has to work on something so they change things and it results in degradation of the software.
I’ve been noticing GitHub’s UI getting sluggish and thought that maybe I’m off my rocker or it was a “my machine” problem, because Github wouldn’t do that… but I guess it’s pretty damn hard to prevent a bunch of devs, managers, and PMs from making changes to prove they should still be employed.
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.
Good question. I don't have now right now but I can prepare one soon. In any case I store zero information from users. When you are logged in traffic goes directly from your browser to GitHub.
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.
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
As an interesting example of the opposite UI experience, this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use: https://youtu.be/-Ln-8QM8KhQ.
It's different from GitHub in many ways (no user-generated content, day-by-day mostly static pages), but it's interesting to see how good a browsing experience can be. It makes sense given that their value as a company depends so much on making it quick and easy to find exactly what you need.
It feels very similar to Facebook UIs and everything under FB for Business (managing ads, Instagram comments, etc). Definitely because of React and the amount of client side rendering logic in general.
Which is crazy given how little interactivity and DOM state a site like GitHub actually needs to manage.
Readit News
It's basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.
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.
Some of the design decisions are also just baffling, like having "New Issue" in a small modal instead of just a full-screen page (only if you have templates set for some reason). Having less than half the screen being used is not helpful, and only going to reduce the quality of reported issues because it's just shit UX. Baffling. I genuinely wonder if the people designing/building this have ever used GitHub themselves (they reverted some of the other misguided "how on earth did you think that was a good idea?!" features, but not this one).
I have so many more gripes and bugs; clicking "show raw" generally works better for viewing code (or just cloning locally). It's just embarrassing. But it's all pointless to report because nothing gets fixed and it all just keeps getting worse.
GitLab was a "GitHub clone", but I guess now GitHub is turning in a "GitLab clone" by making everything a slow janky barely working mess.
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.
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, assigning each individual character its own distinct HTML node...
Needless to say, in addition to abysmal performance (it took seconds to display on my laptop), this also caused new problems (such as the inability to search for certain composite emojis). The worst part is that they seemed proud of their hack, since they wrote a blog post about it.
There is the "view raw logs" button which just opens a plaintext file that my browser loads and searches instantly (imagine that), but doesn't work for still-running jobs.
A web browser can render and search a boring pure-HTML syntax-highlighted source file just fine.
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, in almost all of the code that you write, you typically explicitly opt-in to changes in state.
In React, you explicitly opt-out of state changes by moving code out of the reactive callback because the entire component function is the reactive callback (so any state in the path of that function that should not trigger a re-render has to be moved out via a hook).
This fundamental difference is what makes React hard to do well at scale because one needs to be very cognizant of where to place state inside a component and how to optimize for performance with memoization [2] (something Vue and Svelte developers pretty much never think about). The React team spent 2 years building the compiler to automatically manage memoization, but from the benchmarks I've seen, it's hardly made a difference.
In that time frame, Vue has been working on "Vapor Mode" [3] which bypasses the VDOM and brings it to parity with Svelte, Solid, and very close to Vanilla while still retaining a very easy to grok model of reactivity.
[0] https://youtu.be/INLq9RPAYUw
[1] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2025/01/the-inverted-reactivity-mo...
[2] https://tkdodo.eu/blog/the-uphill-battle-of-memoization, https://tkdodo.eu/blog/the-useless-use-callback
[3] https://www.vuemastery.com/blog/the-future-of-vue-vapor-mode...
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.
My hunch is that over time it became harder and harder for them to hire new frontend developers who didn't insist on building everything new in React and eventually they gave up.
If we inspect the source for Github back in 2010 on the Wayback Machine[0], we can see that they were using jQuery like most sites of that time period.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100115102310/http://github.com... (interestingly, elan/plex shows up as a recently updated repo!)
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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.
The previous AJAXed implementation had its haters, but at least it was very close to bare HTML on HTTP.
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It's very frustrating to have a tool that has spent 15 years fading into the background of reliable infrastructure become an intrusive, distracting mess.
After a couple months with jujutsu it's almost completely replaced my use of git. It’s a lot to hope for, but just as jujutsu surveyed a couple decades of VCS to syncretize a huge improvement, I do hope someone will do the same for collaborating with jujutsu. GitHub PRs feel very unfortunately frozen in amber because their popularity makes it very hard to fix the core UI design problems it has with multiple tabs, incoherent timeline, edited commits, missing "8 more comments", and now a steady drip of SPA jank.
The big remaining feature of GitHub is the network effect of coworkers and potential contributors already being logged in, and there could be a race between a competitor neutralizing that with bidirectional sync (see git-bug) and GitHub getting their usability problems sorted. Microsoft's legendary resistance to breaking changes means there's a very big window available.
You'd think clicking on author's name in commit log view would bring you to their profile — social coding, after all — yet it simply filters the log by author.
Just checked, apparently, they do have a tooltip popup in "Commits" log view to go directly to the author, but who has the time to wait 1s until the tooltip's appearance? Clicking on the name simply filters commits by the author, clicking again, just reloads the same page you're already on — but, hey, at least they didn't break the URL addresses yet!
I’ve been noticing GitHub’s UI getting sluggish and thought that maybe I’m off my rocker or it was a “my machine” problem, because Github wouldn’t do that… but I guess it’s pretty damn hard to prevent a bunch of devs, managers, and PMs from making changes to prove they should still be employed.
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.
Good question. I don't have now right now but I can prepare one soon. In any case I store zero information from users. When you are logged in traffic goes directly from your browser to GitHub.
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.
Deleted Comment
It's different from GitHub in many ways (no user-generated content, day-by-day mostly static pages), but it's interesting to see how good a browsing experience can be. It makes sense given that their value as a company depends so much on making it quick and easy to find exactly what you need.
Which is crazy given how little interactivity and DOM state a site like GitHub actually needs to manage.
It's been like this for at least a year. Does nobody at GH actually use their own website?