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33% Positive

Analyzed from 2461 words in the discussion.

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#github#don#issue#more#still#links#why#something#browser#design

Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Matt138about 1 hour ago
This was a performance driven change. We added this as loading a cross repo issue is a much slower experience than loading an issue in the same repo due to the way the header is loaded (which is being worked on).

But we hear you on the feedback - we will roll this back while we keep pushing on the root performance causes.

Banditoz12 minutes ago
How did the performance of GitHub become so slow in the first place? It didn't used to be this bad years ago.
Xunjin27 minutes ago
To be honest GitHub should have like a switch for "preview stuff adopter" where you guys could give any benefits for it (maybe more copilot usage?). This way you can test with a specific public, using metrics and feedback, while testing and people could comment more about it.
freedomben10 minutes ago
I would like this personally as I hate change in general, but from their perspective it's not a great test because the sample is far from random. They should still do it though
Neywinyabout 1 hour ago
Can you elaborate? The header meaning the top part of the page? I just checked on a recent repo I visited and it has the usual banner (which would stay the same), the repo path, some links, and some stats. Considering every page navigation would likely pull which links and stats are shown, why is this a delta to go to another repo and why are presumably 3 database entries (possible links, stars, forks) so slow?
ezfe34 minutes ago
Navigation within a repository does not reload the page, only the section below the header.
mvdtnz23 minutes ago
I can't speak for GitHub but I've worked on multiple nav headers for large SaaS products and they can be ridiculously heavy weight to render given they appear on every page. They tend to be a dumping ground for features, many of which require their own permissions checks, feature flag checks, etc. it's not unusual to have to perform hierarchical permissions checks. They also tend to contain contextual info about the current nav state and dynamic information about navigable states.

A lot of this can be cached but it's easy to see why moving from one repo to another will invalidate most or all permission checks and feature flag checks.

Matt13810 minutes ago
Yes, pretty much this as well as some additional complexities due to the issue content being in React and the header in Rails - to the cost of approx 500-800ms p50 for a page load vs sub 100ms for a nav to an issue in the same repo (or without the header which is what we tried with this change here)
willio58about 4 hours ago
It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.

Just last night I was helping my GF set up an ad for her job on LinkedIn. The UX was terrible. Like awful and basic things like save and exit were completely broken. Meanwhile LinkedIn makes what percentage of their revenue through ads? Same with google ads. It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.

chuckadamsabout 3 hours ago
I don't think there is such a thing as perfect UX and I'm not asking for it. I just want them to stop making it worse.

Seriously tho, why isn't this something that a browser can do? Why can't I just split a tab and say all links from the left tab open in the right? Why not be able to scroll through history as a list of such panes like a smalltalk browser or file explorer on a mac? Maybe even a history tree, able to be forked with a click or two. Tree-style tabs are a baby step toward that, but I'm not seeing much interest out there in actually learning how to run.

crtasmabout 2 hours ago
xpruegabout 3 hours ago
Just in case you aren’t aware, Edge can split a tab and open links from the left side on the right.
loloquwowndueoabout 2 hours ago
What’s edge ?
Bombthecatabout 1 hour ago
It's more like no one cares about UX. People keep using the product and they keep printing. Why invest in a UX researcher or designer?
glaslongabout 2 hours ago
The larger the company, the more it will be designed according to internal incentives, and less by people actually using their own product.
Zanfaabout 3 hours ago
> It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.

This, but for online shops, especially clothing. Horrendously buggy, laggy, with broken navigation (especially when navigating back), filters that don't work on > 95% of online stores. Why they wouldn't fix their primary (or at the very least highest margin) income stream is beyond me, but I've had to abandon so many shopping carts just because the checkout flow is literally broken.

simonwabout 3 hours ago
UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.
Polizeiposauneabout 3 hours ago
Fast track to loss of respect:

I visit a site/launch the app I always use with the intent of getting something done quickly, and I find that since the last time I used it someone's rearranged the deck chairs and hidden or removed the functionality I need. Something that should take a minute or two suddenly becomes rage-inducing and eats an entire day.

6031769about 2 hours ago
Or the feature is still there but they've renamed it to something totally unrelated which you would never guess. Honestly, it's like they are actively trying to lose users.

The most depressing email to receive is "Good news! We've improved our website ..."

cjbgkaghabout 3 hours ago
The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career).

I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.

chuckadamsabout 3 hours ago
Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.
Wowfunhappyabout 3 hours ago
Part of UX is leveraging what users are already familiar with.
Telaneoabout 2 hours ago
Respect has to be earned, and I don't think anyone (within margin of error) with UX in their job title has earned it. Most of their work consists of shuffling design elements around for its own sake. Sometimes they strike gold (or at least silver or copper), but it never feels like that's done because they target a better design, rather they stumble upon it while making designs whose goal is to be different.

You have to go back to when it was called HIC (Human–computer interaction) to find people who weren't completely brain-dead or ad-pilled when it came to design, did actual work and research trying to make better designs, and thus were at least somewhat respected.

codazodaabout 2 hours ago
I would argue that senior engineers, of which I am one, are more of the problem than junior. We build fancy custom components when we should be using the existing ones.

Yes, the (senior) product and design people are part of the problem too.

We need to build simpler software that works.

faangguyindiaabout 2 hours ago
The other day I was visiting intercom support tool

I realized it has morphed into completely unusable tool with so many features that i don't even know what to do inside it anymore.

Same pattern I saw in many other tools and product. As time passes software becomes more and more complex, then a new one comes which simplifies something and then it also morphs into some enterprise behemoth

giancarlostoroabout 2 hours ago
Something about software engineering has gone wrong nobody thinks much about UX they blindly try to give functionality to the business/ customer requesting it but without considering whats already available and how to maintain status quo as much as possible. But theres also room to make things simple and intuitive.

Google released an AI music studio and their primary UI is literally an AI chat window. I absolutely hate UIs like that.

re-thcabout 2 hours ago
> that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX

I would have thought it'd be the opposite.

It implies have hundreds of teams and UI / UX often is "scaled" in weird ways where everyone does their own thing and becomes a giant mess.

Everything is "correct" when you slice it enough. So from team A's perspective this might be a gain. When you are a part of a team you only see and own this part. That's your KPI.

Unless there's real and working governance (often very very hard) then it's not happening. To get that governance you need company direction and company buy-in that stops managers trying to push new features fast to infinity.

rvzabout 3 hours ago
They make tens of billions, elsewhere to not even care about tiny UX issues like this.

At this point, it will stay broken because the amount of people complaining are not paying but are a tiny amount of people that will end up continuing to live with it.

So it won't be fixed.

mwalserabout 3 hours ago
It's interesting to see that the UX issues that are annoying me when using Azure DevOps are finding their way into GitHub.

In case they are truly chasing Azure DevOps level UX, I would recommend they implement an HTML editor for issues that, depending on whether the user has dark mode or light mode enabled, saves some CSS of the respective mode and makes it unreadable if read within the other mode.

crazygringo36 minutes ago
I'm completely confused by the issue, the linked page is a terribly unclear description. It doesn't clearly explain what prior behavior was, or even what the new behavior is precisely. What on earth is this garbled English supposed to mean:

> any link to an issue form an issue stared to open in a popup overlay instead of navigating to it

When I use GitHub now, I see that when I hover over a link to an issue, it provides a hover popup after a fraction of a second. I can still click the original link to navigate to the issue, or move my mouse and the popup goes away.

Is the complaint that these hover popups exist at all? Or is something else happening to certain people that they're complaining about? There isn't a link to an example page or anything. I'm just baffled here.

leni536about 2 hours ago
Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.
geerlingguyabout 2 hours ago
This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
jamietannaabout 2 hours ago
And GitLab, too!
qwertyforceabout 3 hours ago
It will probably suffer the same fate as the most-upvoted discussion of all time in the GitHub Community repo: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

no reaction

Figsabout 1 hour ago
I don't think GitHub has made a single UI change since ~2023 (when it went JS heavy) that I've liked. (Admittedly though, I've moved away from it for everything I have a choice about at this point, so it's possible they snuck in some good stuff when I wasn't looking.)

Also: having trouble getting this specific link to load -- just getting the unicorn error over and over.

nfw224 minutes ago
Being able to see a detail view without navigating away from the list view is a better user experience and the more common practice now
janaagaardabout 1 hour ago
It sounds like the root issue is that some people prefer opening new tabs while others prefer staying in the same browser window. I surfed the web when all links, even across websites always stayed in the same browser window, and I still prefer that. But I can understand that some people prefer opening new browser tabs instead.

I think web browsers should revisit how they handle links with target=_blank/_top, and show different cursers when hovering and let users customize the default behavior.

mnhnthrow34about 1 hour ago
This is not about new tabs. It refers to an in-page panel that displays the content of the linked issue instead of navigating to it.
olejorgenbabout 1 hour ago
Idk, it almost seem a workaround for slow/broken go-back? If go-back is fast and state preserving, it's basically a fullscreen modal.

All(?) browser open links in a new tab when middle-clicked?

akersten26 minutes ago
GitHub issues (well, PR comments specifically) is possibly the clearest example of developers not knowing how their users use the product. There are only 3 important user stories that matter for this workflow and none of them are done well:

- I want to review surrounding code and get context for a line level change. Can't do it without clicking multiple expanders and even that has a limit of 2 or 3. I also can't comment on surrounding unchanged code which is sometimes extremely relevant, like "copy this pattern"

- I want to see all the unaddressed issues. Ones that are not marked as resolved and not replied to, however you slice it, the issue filters simply don't work

- I don't want the PR author to be able to resolve issues without me getting indicated to verify them. The workaround is them commenting "fixed" on every issue. Make the button say "mark as resolved" and "verify resolved"

- Bonus: if you've got more than 40 comments on a PR, good luck finding some random subset of them. They're just unavailable and the UI unapologetically says "eh can't do it". Yeah small PRs but it happens.

Popup or inline i don't really care, the baseline workflow is completely uninformed.

mikkelamabout 4 hours ago
Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.
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NooneAtAll3about 3 hours ago
I still don't understand what's the point of any full screen popups are
rochaconabout 2 hours ago
And they pushed this as every major browser introduced a "Split View" feature...

I get this issue preview on Projects, although I don't like it there either, but as a hook on any issue link is just terrible UX, zero benefits IMHO.

binarybeeabout 5 hours ago
Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.
Delganabout 3 hours ago
Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.

I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].

They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...

Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O...

[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...

gardnr26 minutes ago
They keep adding “fancy” UI and hijacking standard browser behaviour that is infuriating on a daily basis.

Please consider a lofi version for people that want to select text without navigating to a different page.

shevy-javaabout 3 hours ago
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab, as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub here. This is epic.
red_admiralabout 3 hours ago
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon.

*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked

fmorelabout 3 hours ago
There's already something like this for GitHub: https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github
cebertabout 4 hours ago
I wish they’d focus on making their platform reliable and more stable.
kerncabout 3 hours ago
Why would they care to empower competitors?
add-sub-mul-divabout 3 hours ago
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
kreyenborgiabout 2 hours ago
It took me a while to realize it was not a bug. Utterly insane that this went through QA.
Telaneoabout 2 hours ago
> Utterly insane that this went through QA.

Big assumption you're making there.

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dborehamabout 1 hour ago
Super annoying when I saw this. Initially I assumed I'd strayed into some quadrant of the UI space I hadn't been in before. But no they just broke it for no reason. Well, presumably the reason was someone expected to get a bonus.
luckman212about 5 hours ago
If anyone knows someone at GitHub and can tap them on the shoulder, please ask them to revert this terrible change.
rvzabout 3 hours ago
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
verdvermabout 4 hours ago
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
naikrovekabout 1 hour ago
This is why I kind of think that UI/UX should be handled by normal developers who do other things as well. People whose sole job is UI/UX must do things like this in order to stay employed, normal developers don’t. So teach normal developers how to think about UI and UX so that changes stop happening solely because a specialist needs to change something that does not need changing.

Sorry, UI/UX people, but if you were proceeding towards some finely crafted experience, you’d have honed in on it by now. You would have a set of rules that could be followed to present information in both a pleasing way and a useful way simultaneously and everyone would know how things work because everyone followed the same rules. None of that has happened. You are just changing things to change them.

HeavyStormabout 3 hours ago
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users.

Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out.

Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.

denverllcabout 3 hours ago
> A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable

A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.

the_gipsyabout 1 hour ago
I guarantee you it's not preferable to the majority of github users.
nemomarxabout 2 hours ago
Can you actually show us this research and a/b testing?