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Matt138
Banditoz
How did the performance of GitHub become so slow in the first place? It didn't used to be this bad years ago.
ayewo
Some hard numbers [1] as to why GitHub is struggling with stability issues, directly from GitHub's COO:
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.
jiggawatts
All of which can be handled with horizontal scaling of identical components.
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
userbinator
From what I remember, it got much worse the moment they started requiring JS for displaying what would otherwise be mostly static (and thus easily cached) content.
bsuvc
> loading a cross repo issue is a much slower experience
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).
Neywiny
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?
ezfe
Navigation within a repository does not reload the page, only the section below the header.
BlackFingolfin
which is also driving me nuts because it frequently fails to update the issue and PR counts when I close issues or PRs. Only a hard reload, or closing the tab and opening a new new one, fixes it.
mvdtnz
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.
Matt138
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)
AlotOfReading
How many checks are we talking? A well-implemented monotonic system should be able to do tens of thousands of these checks (or more) in the time budget I associate with a heavy page, and start before the entirety of the permissions/feature data is available.
Xunjin
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.
justinclift
> GitHub should have like a switch for "preview stuff adopter"
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. :( :( :(
freedomben
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
mwalser
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.
easton
They should also order the comments in order of recency top to bottom so you have to read the page in reverse.
willio58
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.
chuckadams
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.
crtasm
Split tabs are now in:
piptastic
Chrome also has split tabs since Feb '26
right click a link, open in split view
pidgeon_lover
I don't understand why browser-makers don't leave window management to the window manager. Split view has been standard in Windows (and probably Linux?) since 2009. I know Mac doesn't really do split windows without additional software, but that's an Apple-being-awkward problem.
xprueg
Just in case you aren’t aware, Edge can split a tab and open links from the left side on the right.
loloquwowndueo
What’s edge ?
userbinator
It's precisely because they're so big that they can afford to overhire lots of designers, which then obviously need to justify their employment by continually changing things. This isn't a problem with small and tiny companies where "UX designer" might not even be a separate job but the responsibility of someone who will care only enough to make something that works and then leave well enough alone.
trueno
i have a really good friend who did the whole UI/UX design bootcamp during the explosion of UX/UI jobs. he did okay, he's probably hopped jobs 2-3 times now and is now without a job.
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
input_sh
It gets increasingly difficult to design a website properly when you have different teams with different goals each competing to put their little feature front-and-centre, leading to a hacky job on top of a hacky job on top of a hacky job, which in turn hurts the performance until one day someone finally decides to re-think the whole thing from scratch and pisses off >50% of its users in the process that are used to the mess.
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.
glaslong
The larger the company, the more it will be designed according to internal incentives, and less by people actually using their own product.
stephenhuey
As someone who has built a lot of greenfield UIs while also maintaining old ones (13+ years old SaaS), I recently set up LinkedIn ads and realized the UX is abysmal considering it’s something they’re actually trying to make money from. Maybe—just maybe-I’ve seen such poor UX in a free web app that lacks a maintenance budget. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is they have a lot of silos within the ad portion of their platform, and each team works on their little corner and no one tries to work with it end to end. Since it’s LinkedIn, this is inexcusable. You go and try to make an ad campaign and then an ad set within it containing some ads, and then come back to it a week later and try to find all these entities you created. You may land on one and take a very long time gritting your teeth and praying for a way click around until you can find another one. What‘s the net drain on worldwide GDP caused by the time-wasting UX of this component of LinkedIn?!
Zanfa
> 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.
Bombthecat
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?
faangguyindia
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
leni536
Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.
geerlingguy
This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
c-hendricks
Every bit of intuition you have using a browser, really? You click a link, the current page changes, you click back, it goes away. You cmd/ctrl click it opens in a new window, you right click and select "open in new tab/window" and it opens in a new tab / window.
snailmailman
Now, when you click a link in GitHub, the current page doesnt change. I want to look at the linked issue on its own page. That doesn’t occur anymore.
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)
jamietanna
And GitLab, too!
qwertyforce
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
Figs
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.
binarybee
Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.
janaagaard
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.
mnhnthrow34
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.
olejorgenb
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?
akersten
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.
crazygringo
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.
tapia
When you click the link it will not navigate to a new page, but instead open some kind of pop-up window with the other issue. I have been very annoyed by this behavior for the last couple of days.
mikkelam
Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.
Delgan
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...
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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.
[update - this change has been reverted and the previous behaviour is back]