But we hear you on the feedback - we will roll this back while we keep pushing on the root performance causes.
[update - this change has been reverted and the previous behaviour is back]
Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.
None of which explains poor latency when opening UI elements, which is more likely be explained by overuse of SPA or spaghetti code in microservices.
Update: yup, that’s exactly it, just as I guessed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912867
Why not solve the real problem instead of putting in a janky workaround?
At risk of being cliche, it seems like you guys could benefit from the 5 Whys approach here: "Why is loading a cross repo issue slow?" and iterate until you discover the root cause, and fix that.
I suspect fixing the root cause is going to be a lot less glorious career-wise than implementing a UX change that is easier to tout at review time (well maybe not so much after this debacle).
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.
They do. And they tend to avoid using it, and/or ignore feedback if it's not in line with the direction that they actually want to go. :( :( :(
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.
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.
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.
right click a link, open in split view
i actually feel for him, it's definitely one of the career paths that's looked at as excess/waste now while companies slim up to reappropriate money for AI. but i do think there was something there, he was genuinely passionate about what he did and it's just really hard to find work doing it now.
i feel guilty saying this but i've let him talk me through some of what he does, show me how he sees and approaches design (the bulk of what he did was design the interfaces for publicly used webapps and mobile apps) and... idk. i feel like it's all acquired taste and almost a "good app developer will think of these things when they design the front end" and a lot of his insight to me broadly looked like a lot of stuff i would've considered myself as a mere sidequest and my general thought process to deliver a good app. the difference is im building the app and designing the user experience, but his entire career is silo'd to just building the user experience.
im not against breaking out the design to a dedicated resource whether thats one designer or one team who wants to try and maintain a consistent language for a company. i think this has upside to make the design experience not locked to a single developer or developer team, and opens it up to a lot more channels of input. but on the other hand, like it's not the end of the world for me as a developer to come up with a really good design & i personally have never imagined myself not considering UX/UI at every corner when I'm building something. It feels like a second nature to me, there's creative aha moments to it, i think it's generally really good for a developer to step into a users shoes and almost "debug" the experience.
where i think ui/ux has gone off the rails:
- i think it's unduly influenced web design and has been poisoned by marketing. the rise of landing pages for SaaS that say a whole lot of fucking nothing and the crossover with "marketing research". i actually literally can't stand these types of pages, i swear 75% of the time i click around and can never get a straight answer on what the product/service is. examples: https://boomi.com https://www.astronomer.io
- things like OP, issue links opening in popups. changing things for the sake of changing things. such a change is probably "backed by research / surveys" giving the illusion that this was a data driven-decision, making it hard to push back on.... despite on deployment = everyone universally hating it. there seems to be some heavy flaws with the data sampling/collection methods that drive these decisions. i think the field of ux/ui as its own distinguished and defined field needs to undergo a self-awareness evolution here. something that's happened quite a few times in engineering. they really need to scoot back and have one of those "sometimes the best path forward is to not change anything at all" moments collectively and learn to recognize when that is right in front of you
- sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) allowing the business to dictate design is mayhaps not a good thing. i think what im trying to say here is the existence of "hes the ux/ui guy in the department, go talk to him" gives business stakeholders misaligned incentives to just go and push a change that isn't _actually_ user oriented, but is heavily tied into some metric or some other stupid business initiative. actually the more that i think about it this is probably why a lot ui/ux careers exist (give all control of the design over to the business) and that seems like a slippery slope
It's way easier to nail the UX when you're still in the dozens-of-employees stage of growth and offer like five features in total.
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.
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
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.
The most depressing email to receive is "Good news! We've improved our website ..."
If you read the old Win32 interface design studies, and Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows" you realize what people click isn't always what they want.
And old UX was ensuring that it was build in a way that what the user clicked was what they wanted.
Now? Since the MBAs came in the UX is another hostile piece of software, trying to trigger you into spending money.
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.
So UX engineers will unleash the latest fad (see Apple's glass UI, or Material Design, variations of flat gray design, etc...), PMs will insist in dumbing down UIs, engineers will push whatever micro-service architecture because it's "cool" or push for rewrites in Rust / Typescript. At the same time, it's very rare for companies to have a single person (or restricted group of people) with a global view on what the product line is trying to achieve long-term.
Computers are data processing machines with input and output. People today think they are vehicles to show design skill, and that’s not what they are. Focusing on design instead of utility is how you ruin any UI/UX anywhere.
Sites like GitHub do not exist for the designer. Sites like GitHub exist for software developers. Software developers should be calling the shots on that site, not designers.
Ralphlauren.com should be designed by designers. Dieterrams.com should be designed by designers. Etc.
Sites for designers should be designed by people who want to show off their designs.
Sites for data entry and manipulation should be designed for those who use that information. Creatives should stay away from sites like GitHub.
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.
What you pay attention to grows. And company's pay attention to those things that move the needle on revenue. For many successful platforms UX doesn't move the needle much anymore (if it ever did). LinkedIn has effectively won their space and a clunky UI isn't going to show up in the numbers.
LinkedIn might have amazing designers on staff, but if leadership isn't prioritizing updates and fixes it won't happen. And leadership won't prioritize it until the problem shows up in the numbers.
Google released an AI music studio and their primary UI is literally an AI chat window. I absolutely hate UIs like that.
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.
-Does it drive more people to the app -Does it maximize time spent on the site -etc
Your idea of perfect is very different than the one LinkedIn is using
That one in particular is super dangerous.
It can incorrectly lead to a process that used to be a 5 second thing suddenly becoming a back and forth 2 hour nightmare, because the metrics show "user spends more time on site".
Though in reality it turned the user from a happy user into a frustrated one whose likely to exit the platform.
Oh, GitHub is probably using a variant of this metric... :)
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.
Yes, the (senior) product and design people are part of the problem too.
We need to build simpler software that works.
The page i wanted to go to pops up in a small overlay on the right hand side. The body text and content that I wanted to view is in a new, weird location, with the old page still behind it in the normal spot. It’s very unintuitive.
Thankfully either the behavior has reverted or I’m no longer in the A/B test. I can’t get the popup to happen anymore for me. (edit, nvm, behavior varies depending on repo or something? it acts completely differently on different pages, sometimes links are normal and sometimes they open in a popup. extremely annoying)
no reaction
Also: having trouble getting this specific link to load -- just getting the unicorn error over and over.
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.
All(?) browser open links in a new tab when middle-clicked?
- 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
Performance is poor and there are a million other reasons to beat up on GH. This is not one of them.
Works on these psuedo links all over github
Please consider a lofi version for people that want to select text without navigating to a different page.
As always in product the user's frustration is real and important but their ideas for a fix are almost never the best choice for the product, the company, or most users.
Big assumption you're making there.
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.
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.
A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.
