6 ms·

Really? Criticizing Google's frontends but praising GitHub and Amazon? If I had to pick a large tech company with a bad frontend Amazon would be top of the list

Really? Criticizing Google's frontends but praising GitHub and Amazon? If I had to pick a large tech company with a bad frontend Amazon would be top of the list. GitHub is not great either. I guess this kind of thing is just subjective though.

simonw 6y ago
What do you find lacking about GitHub's frontend?
- cstrahan 6y ago
  For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example: * say you're on page A * navigate to page B * navigate to page C * click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B * the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar * so you click back again * now your on page A, completely skipping page B * clicking forward takes you back to C Additionally, GitHub is insanely slow. This page, for example, takes 3 seconds to load: https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe66223cff69c7a34599f10e25bb697f300 https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe6622... Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.
  - Raymonf 6y ago
    What browser are you on? The navigation issues don't happen for me on Chrome.
    - cstrahan 6y ago
      The latest Chrome. This has been a problem I've experience for years.
  - Chyzwar 6y ago
    For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks). Back and forward work great on GitHub. My mouse has additional buttons for these.
    - cstrahan 6y ago
      > For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks). My machine: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6850K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 128 GB RAM on Ubuntu Linux 20.04. > My mouse has additional buttons for these. Similar. As a sibling post mentions, the history hijacking does some nasty stuff -- unless you're lucky or something, I guess.
  - noisem4ker 6y ago
    The page switch fuckery I'm noticing is not quite as severe as what you described, but still annoying: * say you're on page A, an open pull request * merge the pull request * switch to a different site entirely * go back to github's page A * notice how it shows the pull request as if it wasn't merged yet * refresh the page and see the status switch to merged I'm using Firefox and I've never tried reproducing this on Chromium.
ubercow13 6y ago
Github's site is really fast. Many of the pages it displays are dense with information and I think it displays everything well, for example viewing diffs in Github is very good, it smartly wraps all the text so you can view everything on the screen and everything loads fast. Try comparing it to Bitbucket's diff view, which can't wrap text amongst other things. It's light years better in comparison. It looks good at any window width with little wasted whitespace. Amazon's site works pretty well. Their product range is quite a mess to navigate but I've never been annoyed much by their front end. It seems pretty well engineered, eg. [1] [1] https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
- mnahkies 6y ago
  On the whole GitHub's UI is good, though I still find it unreasonably difficult/slow to do a review commit by commit compared to kiln. I'd really like it if they added a way to thumb between commits in one click without page loads, kinda like flipping through pages of a book

simonw 6y ago

What do you find lacking about GitHub's frontend?

cstrahan 6y ago
For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example: * say you're on page A * navigate to page B * navigate to page C * click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B * the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar * so you click back again * now your on page A, completely skipping page B * clicking forward takes you back to C Additionally, GitHub is insanely slow. This page, for example, takes 3 seconds to load: https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe66223cff69c7a34599f10e25bb697f300 https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe6622... Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.
- Raymonf 6y ago
  What browser are you on? The navigation issues don't happen for me on Chrome.
  - cstrahan 6y ago
    The latest Chrome. This has been a problem I've experience for years.
- Chyzwar 6y ago
  For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks). Back and forward work great on GitHub. My mouse has additional buttons for these.
  - cstrahan 6y ago
    > For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks). My machine: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6850K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 128 GB RAM on Ubuntu Linux 20.04. > My mouse has additional buttons for these. Similar. As a sibling post mentions, the history hijacking does some nasty stuff -- unless you're lucky or something, I guess.
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  The page switch fuckery I'm noticing is not quite as severe as what you described, but still annoying: * say you're on page A, an open pull request * merge the pull request * switch to a different site entirely * go back to github's page A * notice how it shows the pull request as if it wasn't merged yet * refresh the page and see the status switch to merged I'm using Firefox and I've never tried reproducing this on Chromium.

ubercow13 6y ago

Github's site is really fast. Many of the pages it displays are dense with information and I think it displays everything well, for example viewing diffs in Github is very good, it smartly wraps all the text so you can view everything on the screen and everything loads fast. Try comparing it to Bitbucket's diff view, which can't wrap text amongst other things. It's light years better in comparison. It looks good at any window width with little wasted whitespace. Amazon's site works pretty well. Their product range is quite a mess to navigate but I've never been annoyed much by their front end. It seems pretty well engineered, eg. [1] [1] https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...

mnahkies 6y ago
On the whole GitHub's UI is good, though I still find it unreasonably difficult/slow to do a review commit by commit compared to kiln. I'd really like it if they added a way to thumb between commits in one click without page loads, kinda like flipping through pages of a book