Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.
The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).
I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.
It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.
There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.
> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)
We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/
There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.
I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."
The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.
