18 ms·

The GitHub website is slow on Safari

446 points by talboren 1y ago

draw_down 1y ago
[dead]
muglug 1y ago
Improvements merged within the last two days by the WebKit team: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170922#discussioncomment-14229541 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170922#discuss... For my sins I occasionally create large PRs (> 1,000 files) in GitHub, and teammates (who mostly all use Chrome) will sometimes say "I'll approve once it loads for me..."
- patrickmay 1y ago
  That seems essentially unreviewable. If you can share without violating an NDA, what kind of PR would involve that many files?
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    Ones where you have a lot of generated files you commit into Git, and you change the output of the generator tool.
  - codezero 1y ago
    Can’t speak for the person above but we keep a lot of configuration files in git and could easily write a thousand new configs in a single PR, or adding a new key to all the configs for example.
  - scsh 1y ago
    If the project you're working on vendors dependencies it's pretty easy to end up with that many files being changed when adding or updating, even when trying to make as narrow updates as possible in one PR.
  - bob1029 1y ago
    "Upgrade solution from .NET Framework 4.8 => .NET 8" "Rename 'CustomerEmailAddress' to 'CustomerEmail'" "Upgrade 3rd party API from v3 to v4" I genuinely don't get this notion of a "max # of files in a PR". It all comes off to me as post hoc justification of really shitty technology decisions at GitHub.
    - ambicapter 1y ago
      It's not GitHub-specific advice, it's about reviewability of the PR vs. human working memory/maximum attention span.
      - eviks 1y ago
        How much working memory/attention span is required to look through 1000 identical lines "-CustomerEmailAddress +CustomerEmail"?
        shadowgovt 1y ago
        Ideally, you automate a check like that. Because the answer turns out to actually be "humans are profoundly bad at that kind of pattern recognition." A computer will be able to tell that the 497th has a misspelled `CusomerEmail` or that change 829 is a regexp failure that trimmed the boolean "CustomerEmailAddressed" to "CustomerEmailed" with 100% reliability; humans, not so much.
        makeitdouble 1y ago
        You're not just reviewing the individual lines, but also which context, and which files are impacted. And automating that part would still mean reviewing the automation and the 1000+ changes to move to it. Sure 1000+ changes kills the soul, we're not good at that, but sometimes there's just no other decent choice.
        eviks 1y ago
        Oh, certainly, didn't mean that you had to avoid using your IDE to autorename a variable yourself (to avoid the boolean issue) and diffed results to those of the PR Or that you had to avoid Ctrl+F "CustomerEmail" and see whether you had 1000 matches that matches the number of changed files or only 999 due to some typo. Or using the web interface to filter by file type to batch your reviews. Or... Just that in none of those cases there is anything close to our memory/attention capacity.
  - cesarb 1y ago
    > what kind of PR would involve that many files? A very simple example: migrating from JavaEE to JakartaEE. Every single Java source file has to have the imports changed from "javax." to "jakarta.", which can easily be thousands of files. It's also easy to review (and any file which missed that change will fail when compiling on the CI).
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    Convert space indents to tabs, as god intended.
    - itsgabriel 1y ago
      as god indented, you mean?
      - moffkalast 1y ago
        I'm stealing that one, lmao
- celsoazevedo 1y ago
  How long until those improvements reach users? I assume it requires an OS update or does Safari use something similar to Firefox and Chrome for faster updates?
  - rootnod3 1y ago
    There is a developer version you can install. There is beta, but that overrides your existing Safari and rollback might be tricky sometimes. But there is also the Safari Technology Preview, which installs as a separate app, but is also a bit more unstable. Similar to Chrome Canary.
    - philistine 1y ago
      STP is a great thing if you wished you had two different Safaris. Profiles just don't work as well as a completely different app.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      I had to download STP for a specific case I don't even remember. Ever since, I get frequent OS Update notifications with new STP versions. Updates without a fully system which means no rebooting necessary. About as easy any other software typically does it, only this is using the OS' upgrade so it does make it those extra steps instead of clicking the update->relaunch button
- blinkingled 1y ago
  Thanks, that is definitely a good sign - given the rendering engine monopoly state of Chrome+derivatives and lack of great momentum behind Firefox adoption we need Apple to actively keep Safari not just viable but great even if only on macOS/iOS.
- Sesse__ 1y ago
  Interesting how _everyone_ here blames JS and React, yet the fixes you linked are about CSS performance.
  - jchw 1y ago
    You certainly can build slow apps with React, it doesn't make building slow things that hard. But honestly, React primitives (component mounting/unmounting, rendering, virtual DOM diffing, etc.) just aren't that slow/inefficient and using React in a fairly naive way isn't half-bad for data-heavy apps. I actually have been trying to figure out how to get my React application (unreleased) to perform less laggy in Safari than it does in Firefox/Chrome, and it seems like it is related to all the damn DOM elements. This sucks. Virtualizing viewports adds loads of complexity and breaks some built-in browser features, so I generally prefer not to do it. But, at least in my case, Safari seems to struggle with doing certain layout operations with a shit load of elements more than Chrome and Firefox do.
    - Sesse__ 1y ago
      > You certainly can build slow apps with React, it doesn't make building slow things that hard. By all means. It sometimes feels like React is more the symptom than the actual issue, though. Personally I generally just like having less code; generally makes for fewer footguns. But that's an incredibly hard sell in general (and of course not the entire story).
  - ajross 1y ago
    Confirmation of priors is a powerful drug. And performance engineering is really hard and often lives at a different layer of the stack than the one you know. It's just easier to blame the tools (or companies!) you already hate.
  - psygn89 1y ago
    JS is the logical place to start with all the virtualization and fanciness. But CSS has bit me with heavy pages (causing a few seconds of lag that even devtools debugging/logging didn't point towards). We know wildcard selectors can impact performance, but in my case there were many open ended selectors like `:not(.what) .ever` where the `:not()` not being attached to anything made it act like a wildcard with conditions. Using `:has()` will do the same with additional overhead. Safari was the worst at handling large pages and these types of selectors and I noticed more sluggishness 2-3 years ago.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- darkwater 1y ago
  So, it was actually a bug in Safari's WebKit exposed by Github (which might be abusing it a bit anyway). But hey, since we are all web developers or web users, it's easier to shoot on the pianist (Github in this case)
tupac_speedrap 1y ago
Unfortunately this is the fate of most modern sites, they start off simple then they start bloating the website with social media and analytics. SV blokes don't care or notice on their $5k+ top of the line laptops but for everyone else it's an issue
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Just microsoft sites.
- agos 1y ago
  except it's slow on top of the line laptops, too, so they there's zero excuses
- Nextgrid 1y ago
  This has all to do with JS devs and everyone converging on this terrible language and ecosystem and nothing with analytics/social media.
futurecat 1y ago
GitHub Actions is such a pain to use just because of how sluggish it feels. I hope they’ll improve performance.
- Roark66 1y ago
  We used to use bitbucket Web hooks that used to trigger Jenkins jobs. This was almost instant. Now after migrating to GH actions it can take minutes before jobs start on push for example...
  - simooooo 1y ago
    How big are these jobs? I’ve never seen an action take more than 15s to start
- blibble 1y ago
  > I hope they’ll improve performance. it's Microsoft, so the answer is: buy a new computer (which comes with a bundled Windows license)
  - futurecat 1y ago
    yeah I'll keep my M3
  - layer8 1y ago
    We are at a point where buying a new computer doesn’t actually help.
- wheybags 1y ago
  It also continuously fails to scroll down in the log view when watching output of a ci job live, and has done for years. It's so annoying that I made a userscript to force scrolling: https://github.com/wheybags/userscripts/blob/main/github_actions_scroll_down.js https://github.com/wheybags/userscripts/blob/main/github_act...
  - futurecat 1y ago
pjmlp 1y ago
There are even some famous names on those comments, guess it is pretty bad.
PedroBatista 1y ago
The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github. And no, the problem is not "Rails" or [ insert any other tech BS to deflect the real problems ].
- bob1029 1y ago
  > And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.
  - DrBenCarson 1y ago
    Well yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      Or how much money they are capturing in investiments or corporate deals because of the tech stack
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      They're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.
      - sidewndr46 1y ago
        I'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?
naikrovek 1y ago
This is likely happening in the new Pull Request experience only. If so, it's due to React. This is what happens when you use React for such large pages. "JavaScript is fast!" No, it really isn't. Especially not when you pile abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer.
scary-size 1y ago
Noticed a similar slowdown when opening the GCP console in Safari. Especially the BigQuery editor. It's completely unusable.
- MBCook 1y ago
  The GCP tools are a performance disaster in both Chrome and Safari in my experience. It can be actively painful at times on some screen like the log viewer.
p2detar 1y ago
Yup. I tried to find something in this 120 KB file today on Safari on a M3: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/compiler/frontend/src/org/jetbrains/kotlin/diagnostics/Errors.java https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/compiler/fro... Slow as hell and the Safari search function stopped working. I loaded the same url on Firefox and it was insta-fast.
- toddmorey 1y ago
  Good grief, you can't even scroll that thing
- slipperydippery 1y ago
  "Modern" Web UIs to make backpack-portable supercomputers feel slow operating on text files that wouldn't have been challenging to work with by 1990 standards. The Cloud to make single-digit-seconds operations on a local Raspberry Pi 2 and home Internet take a few minutes. What a time to be alive.
ballenf 1y ago
Can someone who's worked in an org this large help me understand how this happens? They surely do testing against major browsers and saw the performance issues before releasing. Is there really someone who gave the green light?
- whstl 1y ago
  The way it works in tech today is that there are three groups: - Project managers putting constant pressure on developers to deliver as fast as possible. It doesn't even matter if velocity will be lost in the future, or if the company might lose customers, or even if it breaks the law. - Developers pushing back on things that can backfire and burning political capital and causing constant burnout. And when things DO backfire, the developer is to blame for letting it happen and not having pushed it more in the first place. - Developers who learned that the only way to win is by not giving a single fuck, and just trucking on through the tasks without much thought. This might sound highly cynical, but unfortunately this is what it has become. Developers are way too isolated from the end result, and accountability is non-existent for PMs who isolate devs from the result, because "isolating developers" is seem as their only job. EDIT: This is a cultural problem that can't be solved by individual contributors or by middle management without raising hell and putting a target on their backs. Only cultural change enforced by C-Levels is able to change this, but this is *not* in the interest of most CEOs or CTOs.
  - veverkap 1y ago
    This is shockingly accurate - are you a Hubber? :)
    - whstl 1y ago
      What's that, a Github employee? Not really, I'm in an YC startup. But I guess the problem is that every single development position has been converging into this. The only times in my career as a developer where I was 100% happy was when there was no career PM. Sales, customers, end-users, an engineering manager, another manager, a business owner, a random employee, some rando right out the street... All of those were way better product owners than career PMs in my 25 years of experience. This is not exactly about competence of the category, it's just about what fits and doesn't. Software development ONLY work when there is a balance of power. PMs have leverage that developers rarely have. I come from Electrical Engineering. Engineering requires responsibility, but responsibility requires the ability to say "no". PMs, when part of a multi-disciplinary team, make this borderline impossible, and make "being an engineer" synonymous with putting a target on your back.
codezero 1y ago
I don’t have this problem on iOS safari (haven’t checked desktop but never noticed any issues in recent months)
miyuru 1y ago
It not just safari, in firefox its slow too. I see loading spanner everywhere and even the page transition take ages compared to before. I am not sure what metric they are using justify ditching the perfectly working SSR they used before.
- MBCook 1y ago
  I’ve been having issues even in Chrome lately. All three browsers are dying evening the PR isn’t huge.
abdibrokhim 1y ago
fix your wifi
agos 1y ago
I experienced the same since I turned on the "new files changed experience". The fun part is that the first few weeks of the preview it was _worse_ then now. I am truly baffled at the lack of quality on such an important change
bitbasher 1y ago
Another website that is so slow it's unusable is Stripe. My CPU goes to 100% and fans roaring every time I load the dashboard and transactions. I can barely click on customers/subscriptions/etc. I can't be the only one...
- woutr_be 1y ago
  Glad I’m not the only one experiencing this. The Stripe dashboard constantly freezes up for me, even registering a click takes 10-20 seconds. Often it will just go white. Incredible annoying.
  - bitbasher 1y ago
    You're not alone-- on my spouse's M1 MacBook Air the page won't even load anymore. On my beefy system76 laptop I have the same experience as you!
atonse 1y ago
I wondered if it was something new, or that it was just the larger than average pull requests these days I have with AI coding. Good to know others are feeling it too, hopefully it can get resolved soon. In the mean time, i'll try my PR reviews on FF. Update: Just tested my big PR (+8,661, -1,657) on FF and it worked like a charm!
nothrowaways 1y ago
Lately. Everything Microsoft touches has bad UX.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
The GitHub website reminds me of the first video in the Clean Coders series, where he points out that eventually devs want a total rewrite to "Fix" all the shortcomings, but GitHub from the perspective of most users had nothing UI wise that needed fixing. We all would have been happy with the UI as is. Clean code argues that instead of total rewrites you should focus on gradual improvements over time, refactor code so that overtime you pay off the dividends, without re-living through all the bugs you lived through 5 years ago that you don't recall the resolution of. Every rewrite project I've ever worked on, we run into bugs we had already fixed years prior, or the team before me has. There are times when a total rewrite might be the best and only options such as deprecated platforms (think of like Visual Basic 6 apps that will never get threading). What frustrates me more is that GitHub used to be open to browse, and the search worked, now in their effort to force you to make an account (I HAVE LIKE TEN ALREADY) and force you to login, they include a few "dark patterns" where parts of search don't work at all.
- nicce 1y ago
  Rewrite is usually about learning about all the past mistakes and problems and designing your architecture in a way that you prevent all the previously known issues. It is iterative process on the design level. If you end up repeating all the same bugs, it went very wrong from the beginning. So if you don’t have the information about all the previous problems, then it is likely mistake.
- chrisbrandow 1y ago
  It reminds me also of the original head of development of the Safari browser talking about at least the early days of building the browser. They had a rule that no commit of code could cause the browser benchmarks to get slower. And apparently he was maniacal about the rule. I don’t know if that’s a good or realistic rule for most projects, but I imagine for performant types of applications, that’s exactly what it takes to prevent eventual slowdown.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    That reminds me of Linus' attitude about breaking userspace for security fixes.
zackmorris 1y ago
GitHub moved to a JavaScript rendering mode almost as soon as Microsoft bought it. Previously, I had been able to browse it with JavaScript disabled on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13. So even if I enable JavaScript, I can no longer browse GitHub, because they didn't bother to make their build compatible with browser versions as old as mine. It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success. I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.
- sipjca 1y ago
  How does Turing completeness feel like a lie? Planned obsolescence is some of it, some of it is abstractions making it easier for more people to make software (at the cost of using significantly more compute) and Moore’s law being able to support those abstraction layers. Just imagine if every piece of software had to be written in C, the world would look a whole lot different. I also think we’ve gone a bit too far into abstraction land, but hey, that’s where we are and it’s unlikely we are going back. Turing completeness is almost an unrelated concept in all of this if you ask me, and if anything it’s because of completeness that has driven higher and higher memory and compute requirements.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13 I know some people feel like Apple is aggressive in this respect, but that's an 8 year old version of a browser. That's like taking off all of the locks on your house, leaving the doors and windows open all while expecting your house to never have uninvited guests.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    But Apple is also the one locking Safari to the OS, IE style. Having to buy a new machine to get the latest and secure version of a browser is a pretty heavy requirement.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
andreagrandi 1y ago
Ok, so it's not just me. I was just struggling to assign a PR to a couple of colleagues and select a label (on a M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM!)
- andrekandre 1y ago
  same except 64GB and M3 Max smh... takes literally minutes to open the "Labels" popup and make a pr... its completely unacceptable for a product like this...
kstrauser 1y ago
Yeah, it is! Even for simple things, like opening a PR and searching in the combo box for the name of the branch to merge into. We only have like 40 branches. It should not freeze the tab for 30 seconds to search a list of 40 items.
yrds96 1y ago
Isn't the opposite? No one in this thread even cogitating how bad Safari is in terms of performance and supporting web standards? There's in one even partially blaming both. Github isn't the best example of a fast website, but if you can run it in Chrome and Firefox, even on rudimentary browsers like Palemoon (I tested) on decent hardware (even mobile), there's something clearly wrong on Safari.
- cratermoon 1y ago
  Safari is behind on web standards, but often those standards are things designed and implemented by the Chrome team and pushed into standards later. It's the Chromification of the web, where the standard is "whatever chrome does". It's much like the era of "Designed For IE" or "Works best in Netscape 2.3", but now there's a thrice-convicted monopolist in de facto control of the standard.
- _el1s7 1y ago
  Because a lot of apple fanboys everywhere, they'd rather blame the whole web than the shitty apple software.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
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mwsherman 1y ago
Putting on eng manager hat, the problem to solve is that this regression went undetected, not that Safari is slow. The solution is a test that fails when Chrome and Safari have substantially different render times.
- TheDong 1y ago
  > The solution is a test that fails when Chrome and Safari have substantially different render times. That test will be disabled for being flaky in under a week because the CI runners have contention with other jobs, causing them to randomly be slower and flake, and the frontend team does not want to waste time investigating flakes. "Just have dedicated runners with guaranteed CPU performance", but that's the CI platform team's issue, the frontend and testing teams can't fix it, and the CI infra team won't prioritize it for a minimum of 5 years.
adithyassekhar 1y ago
This thread has really opened my eyes to how much the world hates react developers, I am one. Unrealistic timelines, implementing what should be backend logic in frontend, there's a bunch of ways SPA's tend to be a trap. Was react a bad idea? Can anyone point to a single well made react app?
- noname120 1y ago
  https://front.com https://front.com is an example of a React app done right
- AndreasHae 1y ago
  The hate is more geared towards SPAs in general, but there are some shining examples that show that a well-made React/Angular/whatever app can have great UX - Clockify being one of them. I don’t think the culprit apps would have substantially better UX if they were rendered on the server, because these issues tend to be a consequence of devs being pressured to rapidly release new features without regard to quality.
  - adithyassekhar 1y ago
    That's a good example.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    And to be fair, the problems that Facebook had when they introduced React are not common problems at all. As an aside, I was an employee around then and I vividly remember that the next half there was a topline goal to improve web speed. Hmmmm, I wonder what could have happened?
    - Zanfa 1y ago
      > And to be fair, the problems that Facebook had when they introduced React are not common problems at all. That’s one of my favorites. The exact bug they described during React launch presentation, that React was supposed to help fix with the unidirectional dataflow. You know the one where unread message badges were showing up inconsistently in the UI in different places. They never managed to fix that bug in the 10 years since React was announced and I eventually left Facebook for good.
dham 1y ago
Everything is slower across every single facet of computing. Something is happening. I have a brand new Mac Studio M4 Max with 64gb of ram and every site is still slower than it was on a 2011 Mac Book Pro.
- treve 1y ago
  Web developers should be forced to use hardware that's roughly at the 10th percentile in performance of their user base, not the 90th. Alternatively, make performance a WCAG concern.
  - LilBytes 1y ago
    I don't think this would help, if a site or SPA performs terribly on a high end machine, the only conclusion I can draw is performance testing isn't tested or validated at all.
  - varenc 1y ago
    Chrome Dev tools, and hopefully others, have a performance monitor option that lets you throttle the CPU and throttle the network. It should be plenty possible to test performance of sites on simulated 10th percentile systems, but this just seems low priority.
- anon7000 1y ago
  I remember using the internet 15 years aho, and things were definitely slower. I also wasn’t using the internet to run full-blown spreadsheets and design tools back then. My M series Macs are the snappiest computers I’ve used (minus my desktop when it runs Linux, but not windows).
jasonjmcghee 1y ago
A regular GitHub annoyance for me is the propensity to lose the browser history for the main repo page. On random site, Navigate to GitHub repo, navigate to file in repo, and hit back, and I'm on the random site, hit forward and I'm on the file. So annoying. One of a large handful of issues I've encountered post react conversion
- chatmasta 1y ago
  This is my #1 annoyance when reading HN on my iPhone. I scrolled the comments here looking for this complaint. Any time I click a GitHub link, if I navigate beyond the readme, then my history is completely borked. Going “back” one page might go to the readme, might go back to HN, or might even go back to the readme and then back to the page I was trying to leave! It’s infuriating and I always figured it was a bug they’d fix eventually but it’s been at least two years of this crap.
c-hendricks 1y ago
Something did change with Safari when handling lots of DOM nodes around the last major release of all Apple's operating systems. I have an ever growing directory listing using SolidJS, and it's up to about 25,000 items. Safari macOS and iOS two major versions ago actually handled it well. After the last major update, my phone rendered it faster than an m1 MacBook Pro.
don_searchcraft 1y ago
The diff view on large PRs is pretty much unusable on all browsers.
rbalicki 1y ago
GitHub has a great GraphQL API but a subpar UI. It's a great fit for Isograph! Anyway, if folks are interested, feel free to check out this conference talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf8ac2NtwPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf8ac2NtwPY), where vibe code an Isograph app that consumes the GitHub API. TLDR, it is a lot easier to replace GitHub than you think, and it would make for a hell of a splashy side project.
mococa 1y ago
I use Safari in my daily life, and I feel like 90% of the web apps I access are the worst crap in the world. At work, they decided to use Jira. Besides being slow, it consumes up to 2GB of RAM. Two gigabytes of RAM just for tickets? Ridiculous.
ezekg 1y ago
It's been very clear to me for quite awhile that they have to be doing this to push users to their mobile app, at least on iOS. I used to review PRs on my phone at night, but now I have to use the app because anything over a thousand lines will crash iOS Safari or cause scrolling to misbehave. Reddit has done the same over the years, as have countless other web apps. You really can't escape the enshittification.
arianvanp 1y ago
My browser crashed 10 times today trying to copy code in Safari. It's unbearable bad.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  While there may be a weird bug affecting Github, the browser crashing is always a browser bug. Github can't fix Safari.
  - arianvanp 1y ago
    Correction: just the tab crashed And this is something browsers don't treat as bugs. You can crash any browser's tab by just exhausting its allocated memory
tannhaeuser 1y ago
Forget slowness, it basically answers any search with "try another time."
epolanski 1y ago
GitHub web used to be great. Then some charlatan thought to embrace the React hype and it became terrible to say the least.
- bapak 1y ago
  As a hater of React, I don’t think React itself is to blame. Old GitHub was very light on features, whereas the new UIs are way more curated on the surface. Unfortunately all of this brings in tons of complexity. It doesn't help that there are a lot of junior developers working on it, clearly.
  - TheDong 1y ago
    What new features has the new UI brought to justify this complexity and slowness? I haven't been able to load it yet to actually check out these hip new features, it just crashes my browser, but I'm sure they must be great?
freediver 1y ago
Related: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247782 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247782
wuming2 1y ago
It has to present text lists, tables and small icons. Makes mobile Safari crawl to a halt. With multi gigahertz, multi core cpus and hardware accelerated js. It is pathetic.
Razengan 1y ago
huh? I never felt it to be slow on Safari, using em for years now.
user94wjwuid 1y ago
I’m usually a fan of going the SPA route. But for something like version control of a code base, the mission critical nature of it, I think should have less frills and serve plain html and css with optional js enhancements
xvilka 1y ago
Just migrate to Forgejo/Codeberg[1][2] or SourceHut[3]. Both are like a light speed compared to GitHub and GitLab. [1] https://forgejo.org https://forgejo.org [2] https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org [3] https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org
- pietervdvn 1y ago
  My forgejo-server ran on a broken fiber for a few weeks - we're talking about speeds in the single kilobits/s. It kept up fairly well! Pushes and pulls would still kinda work, actions not so much (but that's cause it needed to transfer more then 100MB)
- sheo 1y ago
  I think Forgejo is great. But we need to remember the fact that many enterprises pick GitHub or GitLab because they provide paid support and SLA. Also Forgejo Actions are still in beta, while GitLab and GitHub are pretty established solutions for CI/CD Sourcehut is basically a really barebones web interface for git server, so I don't think it's really comparable to GitHub For hosting your own projects that's sometimes not a viable solution either. Limiting your open source project to platform other than GitHub hurts it's discoverability, because usually GitHub is what most devs and non devs associate with open source. I heard a lot of "It's not open source if it's not on GitHub". You can mirror your project to GH of course "Just migrate to X because it's faster" doesn't work that well in the real world
blu3h4t 1y ago
Maybe somewhat off topic but my GitHub app on an iPhone haven’t been updating the feed for a few months now, so no have relogged earlier but still the same. Edit: could it have something to do with lockdown mode or how is it called now.
dbalatero 1y ago
I'm begging all the React haters to read the actual link (it's CSS transform).
Suzuran 1y ago
I noticed this awhile ago and assumed it was a deliberate move by Microsoft to suppress use of competing products.
mediumsmart 1y ago
Maybe it just reacts slowly.
MilyMason2 1y ago
[dead]
martinwoodward 1y ago
This should be fixed now. See the thread for more details. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170758#discussioncomment-14248533 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170758#discuss...
vintagedave 1y ago
I've read comments online (here on HN) that Github has been rewriting their UI in React and that it's got slower since. I have no knowledge if this is true or not (ie React -> speed direct correlation), and my own projects are small enough not to see any performance impact. Does anyone have concrete information?
- sleepytimetea 1y ago
  They just pushed a new redesigned page for pull request diffs- must have bloated the DOM.
  - mtmail 1y ago
    I still see a little "try the new experience" link on the PR diff page (top right of page) so the rollout might be gradual. I won't click.
    - walthamstow 1y ago
      I am such a masochist that I actually click those buttons. If it's good, great, if it's shit, I have time to adjust before they foist it upon me anyway
      - adithyassekhar 1y ago
        I am on insider previews and betas for all apps I use. You're not alone.
      - guappa 1y ago
        I prefer to delay the pain as much as possible instead
    - herpdyderp 1y ago
      I tried it! I like it generally, but it’s too buggy. The whole diff explodes if you expand to more lines (for example). It’s easy to switch back.
- 1y ago
CafeRacer 1y ago
It truly feels like Jira.
- crinkly 1y ago
  Wait until you plug it into JIRA, strap copilot and actions on it. Then you can have all flavours of hell at once. Our org has ground to a halt. A lot of the time we just break the branch permissions on the repo we are using and run release branches without PRs and ignore the entire web interface.
  - afandian 1y ago
    Just because I went to look it up, I thought I'd share. Looks like Atlassian removed the bit from the Terms of Service where you were prohibited from: > publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products https://web.archive.org/web/20210624221204/https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service https://web.archive.org/web/20210624221204/https://www.atlas...
    - crinkly 1y ago
      I didn't buy it or agree to them anyway :)
- Nextgrid 1y ago
  It’s afflicted by the same disease: overuse of JavaScript and the need to give JS developers something to do. If you actually load up a ~2015 version of Jira on today’s hardware it’s basically instant.
  - slipperydippery 1y ago
    I was reminded how fucked the modern web is a couple years ago when I encountered a so-fast-it-felt-like-local-static-html website dashboard that could have been a "web app", but wasn't. It was being hosted on another continent. It was written in PHP. It was rendering server-side with just some light JS on my end. That used to be the norm.

446 points by talboren 1y ago

[dead]

Improvements merged within the last two days by the WebKit team: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170922#discussioncomment-14229541 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170922#discuss... For my sins I occasionally create large PRs (> 1,000 files) in GitHub, and teammates (who mostly all use Chrome) will sometimes say "I'll approve once it loads for me..."

patrickmay 1y ago
That seems essentially unreviewable. If you can share without violating an NDA, what kind of PR would involve that many files?
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  Ones where you have a lot of generated files you commit into Git, and you change the output of the generator tool.
- codezero 1y ago
  Can’t speak for the person above but we keep a lot of configuration files in git and could easily write a thousand new configs in a single PR, or adding a new key to all the configs for example.
- scsh 1y ago
  If the project you're working on vendors dependencies it's pretty easy to end up with that many files being changed when adding or updating, even when trying to make as narrow updates as possible in one PR.
- bob1029 1y ago
  "Upgrade solution from .NET Framework 4.8 => .NET 8" "Rename 'CustomerEmailAddress' to 'CustomerEmail'" "Upgrade 3rd party API from v3 to v4" I genuinely don't get this notion of a "max # of files in a PR". It all comes off to me as post hoc justification of really shitty technology decisions at GitHub.
  - ambicapter 1y ago
    It's not GitHub-specific advice, it's about reviewability of the PR vs. human working memory/maximum attention span.
    - eviks 1y ago
      How much working memory/attention span is required to look through 1000 identical lines "-CustomerEmailAddress +CustomerEmail"?
      - shadowgovt 1y ago
        Ideally, you automate a check like that. Because the answer turns out to actually be "humans are profoundly bad at that kind of pattern recognition." A computer will be able to tell that the 497th has a misspelled `CusomerEmail` or that change 829 is a regexp failure that trimmed the boolean "CustomerEmailAddressed" to "CustomerEmailed" with 100% reliability; humans, not so much.
        makeitdouble 1y ago
        You're not just reviewing the individual lines, but also which context, and which files are impacted. And automating that part would still mean reviewing the automation and the 1000+ changes to move to it. Sure 1000+ changes kills the soul, we're not good at that, but sometimes there's just no other decent choice.
        eviks 1y ago
        Oh, certainly, didn't mean that you had to avoid using your IDE to autorename a variable yourself (to avoid the boolean issue) and diffed results to those of the PR Or that you had to avoid Ctrl+F "CustomerEmail" and see whether you had 1000 matches that matches the number of changed files or only 999 due to some typo. Or using the web interface to filter by file type to batch your reviews. Or... Just that in none of those cases there is anything close to our memory/attention capacity.
- cesarb 1y ago
  > what kind of PR would involve that many files? A very simple example: migrating from JavaEE to JakartaEE. Every single Java source file has to have the imports changed from "javax." to "jakarta.", which can easily be thousands of files. It's also easy to review (and any file which missed that change will fail when compiling on the CI).
- moffkalast 1y ago
  Convert space indents to tabs, as god intended.
  - itsgabriel 1y ago
    as god indented, you mean?
    - moffkalast 1y ago
      I'm stealing that one, lmao
celsoazevedo 1y ago
How long until those improvements reach users? I assume it requires an OS update or does Safari use something similar to Firefox and Chrome for faster updates?
- rootnod3 1y ago
  There is a developer version you can install. There is beta, but that overrides your existing Safari and rollback might be tricky sometimes. But there is also the Safari Technology Preview, which installs as a separate app, but is also a bit more unstable. Similar to Chrome Canary.
  - philistine 1y ago
    STP is a great thing if you wished you had two different Safaris. Profiles just don't work as well as a completely different app.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    I had to download STP for a specific case I don't even remember. Ever since, I get frequent OS Update notifications with new STP versions. Updates without a fully system which means no rebooting necessary. About as easy any other software typically does it, only this is using the OS' upgrade so it does make it those extra steps instead of clicking the update->relaunch button
blinkingled 1y ago
Thanks, that is definitely a good sign - given the rendering engine monopoly state of Chrome+derivatives and lack of great momentum behind Firefox adoption we need Apple to actively keep Safari not just viable but great even if only on macOS/iOS.
Sesse__ 1y ago
Interesting how _everyone_ here blames JS and React, yet the fixes you linked are about CSS performance.
- jchw 1y ago
  You certainly can build slow apps with React, it doesn't make building slow things that hard. But honestly, React primitives (component mounting/unmounting, rendering, virtual DOM diffing, etc.) just aren't that slow/inefficient and using React in a fairly naive way isn't half-bad for data-heavy apps. I actually have been trying to figure out how to get my React application (unreleased) to perform less laggy in Safari than it does in Firefox/Chrome, and it seems like it is related to all the damn DOM elements. This sucks. Virtualizing viewports adds loads of complexity and breaks some built-in browser features, so I generally prefer not to do it. But, at least in my case, Safari seems to struggle with doing certain layout operations with a shit load of elements more than Chrome and Firefox do.
  - Sesse__ 1y ago
    > You certainly can build slow apps with React, it doesn't make building slow things that hard. By all means. It sometimes feels like React is more the symptom than the actual issue, though. Personally I generally just like having less code; generally makes for fewer footguns. But that's an incredibly hard sell in general (and of course not the entire story).
- ajross 1y ago
  Confirmation of priors is a powerful drug. And performance engineering is really hard and often lives at a different layer of the stack than the one you know. It's just easier to blame the tools (or companies!) you already hate.
- psygn89 1y ago
  JS is the logical place to start with all the virtualization and fanciness. But CSS has bit me with heavy pages (causing a few seconds of lag that even devtools debugging/logging didn't point towards). We know wildcard selectors can impact performance, but in my case there were many open ended selectors like `:not(.what) .ever` where the `:not()` not being attached to anything made it act like a wildcard with conditions. Using `:has()` will do the same with additional overhead. Safari was the worst at handling large pages and these types of selectors and I noticed more sluggishness 2-3 years ago.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
darkwater 1y ago
So, it was actually a bug in Safari's WebKit exposed by Github (which might be abusing it a bit anyway). But hey, since we are all web developers or web users, it's easier to shoot on the pianist (Github in this case)

tupac_speedrap 1y ago

Unfortunately this is the fate of most modern sites, they start off simple then they start bloating the website with social media and analytics. SV blokes don't care or notice on their $5k+ top of the line laptops but for everyone else it's an issue

datadrivenangel 1y ago
Just microsoft sites.
agos 1y ago
except it's slow on top of the line laptops, too, so they there's zero excuses
Nextgrid 1y ago
This has all to do with JS devs and everyone converging on this terrible language and ecosystem and nothing with analytics/social media.

futurecat 1y ago

GitHub Actions is such a pain to use just because of how sluggish it feels. I hope they’ll improve performance.

Roark66 1y ago
We used to use bitbucket Web hooks that used to trigger Jenkins jobs. This was almost instant. Now after migrating to GH actions it can take minutes before jobs start on push for example...
- simooooo 1y ago
  How big are these jobs? I’ve never seen an action take more than 15s to start
blibble 1y ago
> I hope they’ll improve performance. it's Microsoft, so the answer is: buy a new computer (which comes with a bundled Windows license)
- futurecat 1y ago
  yeah I'll keep my M3
- layer8 1y ago
  We are at a point where buying a new computer doesn’t actually help.
wheybags 1y ago
It also continuously fails to scroll down in the log view when watching output of a ci job live, and has done for years. It's so annoying that I made a userscript to force scrolling: https://github.com/wheybags/userscripts/blob/main/github_actions_scroll_down.js https://github.com/wheybags/userscripts/blob/main/github_act...
- futurecat 1y ago

pjmlp 1y ago

There are even some famous names on those comments, guess it is pretty bad.

PedroBatista 1y ago

The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github. And no, the problem is not "Rails" or [ insert any other tech BS to deflect the real problems ].

bob1029 1y ago
> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.
- DrBenCarson 1y ago
  Well yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    Or how much money they are capturing in investiments or corporate deals because of the tech stack
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    They're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.
    - sidewndr46 1y ago
      I'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?

naikrovek 1y ago

This is likely happening in the new Pull Request experience only. If so, it's due to React. This is what happens when you use React for such large pages. "JavaScript is fast!" No, it really isn't. Especially not when you pile abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer on top of abstraction layer.

scary-size 1y ago

Noticed a similar slowdown when opening the GCP console in Safari. Especially the BigQuery editor. It's completely unusable.

MBCook 1y ago
The GCP tools are a performance disaster in both Chrome and Safari in my experience. It can be actively painful at times on some screen like the log viewer.

p2detar 1y ago

Yup. I tried to find something in this 120 KB file today on Safari on a M3: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/compiler/frontend/src/org/jetbrains/kotlin/diagnostics/Errors.java https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/compiler/fro... Slow as hell and the Safari search function stopped working. I loaded the same url on Firefox and it was insta-fast.

toddmorey 1y ago
Good grief, you can't even scroll that thing
slipperydippery 1y ago
"Modern" Web UIs to make backpack-portable supercomputers feel slow operating on text files that wouldn't have been challenging to work with by 1990 standards. The Cloud to make single-digit-seconds operations on a local Raspberry Pi 2 and home Internet take a few minutes. What a time to be alive.

ballenf 1y ago

Can someone who's worked in an org this large help me understand how this happens? They surely do testing against major browsers and saw the performance issues before releasing. Is there really someone who gave the green light?

whstl 1y ago
The way it works in tech today is that there are three groups: - Project managers putting constant pressure on developers to deliver as fast as possible. It doesn't even matter if velocity will be lost in the future, or if the company might lose customers, or even if it breaks the law. - Developers pushing back on things that can backfire and burning political capital and causing constant burnout. And when things DO backfire, the developer is to blame for letting it happen and not having pushed it more in the first place. - Developers who learned that the only way to win is by not giving a single fuck, and just trucking on through the tasks without much thought. This might sound highly cynical, but unfortunately this is what it has become. Developers are way too isolated from the end result, and accountability is non-existent for PMs who isolate devs from the result, because "isolating developers" is seem as their only job. EDIT: This is a cultural problem that can't be solved by individual contributors or by middle management without raising hell and putting a target on their backs. Only cultural change enforced by C-Levels is able to change this, but this is *not* in the interest of most CEOs or CTOs.
- veverkap 1y ago
  This is shockingly accurate - are you a Hubber? :)
  - whstl 1y ago
    What's that, a Github employee? Not really, I'm in an YC startup. But I guess the problem is that every single development position has been converging into this. The only times in my career as a developer where I was 100% happy was when there was no career PM. Sales, customers, end-users, an engineering manager, another manager, a business owner, a random employee, some rando right out the street... All of those were way better product owners than career PMs in my 25 years of experience. This is not exactly about competence of the category, it's just about what fits and doesn't. Software development ONLY work when there is a balance of power. PMs have leverage that developers rarely have. I come from Electrical Engineering. Engineering requires responsibility, but responsibility requires the ability to say "no". PMs, when part of a multi-disciplinary team, make this borderline impossible, and make "being an engineer" synonymous with putting a target on your back.

codezero 1y ago

I don’t have this problem on iOS safari (haven’t checked desktop but never noticed any issues in recent months)

miyuru 1y ago

It not just safari, in firefox its slow too. I see loading spanner everywhere and even the page transition take ages compared to before. I am not sure what metric they are using justify ditching the perfectly working SSR they used before.

MBCook 1y ago
I’ve been having issues even in Chrome lately. All three browsers are dying evening the PR isn’t huge.

abdibrokhim 1y ago

fix your wifi

agos 1y ago

I experienced the same since I turned on the "new files changed experience". The fun part is that the first few weeks of the preview it was _worse_ then now. I am truly baffled at the lack of quality on such an important change

bitbasher 1y ago

Another website that is so slow it's unusable is Stripe. My CPU goes to 100% and fans roaring every time I load the dashboard and transactions. I can barely click on customers/subscriptions/etc. I can't be the only one...

woutr_be 1y ago
Glad I’m not the only one experiencing this. The Stripe dashboard constantly freezes up for me, even registering a click takes 10-20 seconds. Often it will just go white. Incredible annoying.
- bitbasher 1y ago
  You're not alone-- on my spouse's M1 MacBook Air the page won't even load anymore. On my beefy system76 laptop I have the same experience as you!

atonse 1y ago

I wondered if it was something new, or that it was just the larger than average pull requests these days I have with AI coding. Good to know others are feeling it too, hopefully it can get resolved soon. In the mean time, i'll try my PR reviews on FF. Update: Just tested my big PR (+8,661, -1,657) on FF and it worked like a charm!

nothrowaways 1y ago

Lately. Everything Microsoft touches has bad UX.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

The GitHub website reminds me of the first video in the Clean Coders series, where he points out that eventually devs want a total rewrite to "Fix" all the shortcomings, but GitHub from the perspective of most users had nothing UI wise that needed fixing. We all would have been happy with the UI as is. Clean code argues that instead of total rewrites you should focus on gradual improvements over time, refactor code so that overtime you pay off the dividends, without re-living through all the bugs you lived through 5 years ago that you don't recall the resolution of. Every rewrite project I've ever worked on, we run into bugs we had already fixed years prior, or the team before me has. There are times when a total rewrite might be the best and only options such as deprecated platforms (think of like Visual Basic 6 apps that will never get threading). What frustrates me more is that GitHub used to be open to browse, and the search worked, now in their effort to force you to make an account (I HAVE LIKE TEN ALREADY) and force you to login, they include a few "dark patterns" where parts of search don't work at all.

nicce 1y ago
Rewrite is usually about learning about all the past mistakes and problems and designing your architecture in a way that you prevent all the previously known issues. It is iterative process on the design level. If you end up repeating all the same bugs, it went very wrong from the beginning. So if you don’t have the information about all the previous problems, then it is likely mistake.
chrisbrandow 1y ago
It reminds me also of the original head of development of the Safari browser talking about at least the early days of building the browser. They had a rule that no commit of code could cause the browser benchmarks to get slower. And apparently he was maniacal about the rule. I don’t know if that’s a good or realistic rule for most projects, but I imagine for performant types of applications, that’s exactly what it takes to prevent eventual slowdown.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  That reminds me of Linus' attitude about breaking userspace for security fixes.

zackmorris 1y ago

GitHub moved to a JavaScript rendering mode almost as soon as Microsoft bought it. Previously, I had been able to browse it with JavaScript disabled on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13. So even if I enable JavaScript, I can no longer browse GitHub, because they didn't bother to make their build compatible with browser versions as old as mine. It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success. I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.

sipjca 1y ago
How does Turing completeness feel like a lie? Planned obsolescence is some of it, some of it is abstractions making it easier for more people to make software (at the cost of using significantly more compute) and Moore’s law being able to support those abstraction layers. Just imagine if every piece of software had to be written in C, the world would look a whole lot different. I also think we’ve gone a bit too far into abstraction land, but hey, that’s where we are and it’s unlikely we are going back. Turing completeness is almost an unrelated concept in all of this if you ask me, and if anything it’s because of completeness that has driven higher and higher memory and compute requirements.
dylan604 1y ago
> on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13 I know some people feel like Apple is aggressive in this respect, but that's an 8 year old version of a browser. That's like taking off all of the locks on your house, leaving the doors and windows open all while expecting your house to never have uninvited guests.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  But Apple is also the one locking Safari to the OS, IE style. Having to buy a new machine to get the latest and secure version of a browser is a pretty heavy requirement.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

andreagrandi 1y ago

Ok, so it's not just me. I was just struggling to assign a PR to a couple of colleagues and select a label (on a M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM!)

andrekandre 1y ago
same except 64GB and M3 Max smh... takes literally minutes to open the "Labels" popup and make a pr... its completely unacceptable for a product like this...

kstrauser 1y ago

Yeah, it is! Even for simple things, like opening a PR and searching in the combo box for the name of the branch to merge into. We only have like 40 branches. It should not freeze the tab for 30 seconds to search a list of 40 items.

yrds96 1y ago

Isn't the opposite? No one in this thread even cogitating how bad Safari is in terms of performance and supporting web standards? There's in one even partially blaming both. Github isn't the best example of a fast website, but if you can run it in Chrome and Firefox, even on rudimentary browsers like Palemoon (I tested) on decent hardware (even mobile), there's something clearly wrong on Safari.

cratermoon 1y ago
Safari is behind on web standards, but often those standards are things designed and implemented by the Chrome team and pushed into standards later. It's the Chromification of the web, where the standard is "whatever chrome does". It's much like the era of "Designed For IE" or "Works best in Netscape 2.3", but now there's a thrice-convicted monopolist in de facto control of the standard.
_el1s7 1y ago
Because a lot of apple fanboys everywhere, they'd rather blame the whole web than the shitty apple software.
- deleted 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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mwsherman 1y ago

Putting on eng manager hat, the problem to solve is that this regression went undetected, not that Safari is slow. The solution is a test that fails when Chrome and Safari have substantially different render times.

TheDong 1y ago
> The solution is a test that fails when Chrome and Safari have substantially different render times. That test will be disabled for being flaky in under a week because the CI runners have contention with other jobs, causing them to randomly be slower and flake, and the frontend team does not want to waste time investigating flakes. "Just have dedicated runners with guaranteed CPU performance", but that's the CI platform team's issue, the frontend and testing teams can't fix it, and the CI infra team won't prioritize it for a minimum of 5 years.

adithyassekhar 1y ago

This thread has really opened my eyes to how much the world hates react developers, I am one. Unrealistic timelines, implementing what should be backend logic in frontend, there's a bunch of ways SPA's tend to be a trap. Was react a bad idea? Can anyone point to a single well made react app?

noname120 1y ago
https://front.com https://front.com is an example of a React app done right
AndreasHae 1y ago
The hate is more geared towards SPAs in general, but there are some shining examples that show that a well-made React/Angular/whatever app can have great UX - Clockify being one of them. I don’t think the culprit apps would have substantially better UX if they were rendered on the server, because these issues tend to be a consequence of devs being pressured to rapidly release new features without regard to quality.
- adithyassekhar 1y ago
  That's a good example.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  And to be fair, the problems that Facebook had when they introduced React are not common problems at all. As an aside, I was an employee around then and I vividly remember that the next half there was a topline goal to improve web speed. Hmmmm, I wonder what could have happened?
  - Zanfa 1y ago
    > And to be fair, the problems that Facebook had when they introduced React are not common problems at all. That’s one of my favorites. The exact bug they described during React launch presentation, that React was supposed to help fix with the unidirectional dataflow. You know the one where unread message badges were showing up inconsistently in the UI in different places. They never managed to fix that bug in the 10 years since React was announced and I eventually left Facebook for good.

dham 1y ago

Everything is slower across every single facet of computing. Something is happening. I have a brand new Mac Studio M4 Max with 64gb of ram and every site is still slower than it was on a 2011 Mac Book Pro.

treve 1y ago
Web developers should be forced to use hardware that's roughly at the 10th percentile in performance of their user base, not the 90th. Alternatively, make performance a WCAG concern.
- LilBytes 1y ago
  I don't think this would help, if a site or SPA performs terribly on a high end machine, the only conclusion I can draw is performance testing isn't tested or validated at all.
- varenc 1y ago
  Chrome Dev tools, and hopefully others, have a performance monitor option that lets you throttle the CPU and throttle the network. It should be plenty possible to test performance of sites on simulated 10th percentile systems, but this just seems low priority.
anon7000 1y ago
I remember using the internet 15 years aho, and things were definitely slower. I also wasn’t using the internet to run full-blown spreadsheets and design tools back then. My M series Macs are the snappiest computers I’ve used (minus my desktop when it runs Linux, but not windows).

jasonjmcghee 1y ago

A regular GitHub annoyance for me is the propensity to lose the browser history for the main repo page. On random site, Navigate to GitHub repo, navigate to file in repo, and hit back, and I'm on the random site, hit forward and I'm on the file. So annoying. One of a large handful of issues I've encountered post react conversion

chatmasta 1y ago
This is my #1 annoyance when reading HN on my iPhone. I scrolled the comments here looking for this complaint. Any time I click a GitHub link, if I navigate beyond the readme, then my history is completely borked. Going “back” one page might go to the readme, might go back to HN, or might even go back to the readme and then back to the page I was trying to leave! It’s infuriating and I always figured it was a bug they’d fix eventually but it’s been at least two years of this crap.

c-hendricks 1y ago

Something did change with Safari when handling lots of DOM nodes around the last major release of all Apple's operating systems. I have an ever growing directory listing using SolidJS, and it's up to about 25,000 items. Safari macOS and iOS two major versions ago actually handled it well. After the last major update, my phone rendered it faster than an m1 MacBook Pro.

don_searchcraft 1y ago

The diff view on large PRs is pretty much unusable on all browsers.

rbalicki 1y ago

GitHub has a great GraphQL API but a subpar UI. It's a great fit for Isograph! Anyway, if folks are interested, feel free to check out this conference talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf8ac2NtwPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf8ac2NtwPY), where vibe code an Isograph app that consumes the GitHub API. TLDR, it is a lot easier to replace GitHub than you think, and it would make for a hell of a splashy side project.

mococa 1y ago

I use Safari in my daily life, and I feel like 90% of the web apps I access are the worst crap in the world. At work, they decided to use Jira. Besides being slow, it consumes up to 2GB of RAM. Two gigabytes of RAM just for tickets? Ridiculous.

ezekg 1y ago

It's been very clear to me for quite awhile that they have to be doing this to push users to their mobile app, at least on iOS. I used to review PRs on my phone at night, but now I have to use the app because anything over a thousand lines will crash iOS Safari or cause scrolling to misbehave. Reddit has done the same over the years, as have countless other web apps. You really can't escape the enshittification.

arianvanp 1y ago

My browser crashed 10 times today trying to copy code in Safari. It's unbearable bad.

jeroenhd 1y ago
While there may be a weird bug affecting Github, the browser crashing is always a browser bug. Github can't fix Safari.
- arianvanp 1y ago
  Correction: just the tab crashed And this is something browsers don't treat as bugs. You can crash any browser's tab by just exhausting its allocated memory

tannhaeuser 1y ago

Forget slowness, it basically answers any search with "try another time."

epolanski 1y ago

GitHub web used to be great. Then some charlatan thought to embrace the React hype and it became terrible to say the least.

bapak 1y ago
As a hater of React, I don’t think React itself is to blame. Old GitHub was very light on features, whereas the new UIs are way more curated on the surface. Unfortunately all of this brings in tons of complexity. It doesn't help that there are a lot of junior developers working on it, clearly.
- TheDong 1y ago
  What new features has the new UI brought to justify this complexity and slowness? I haven't been able to load it yet to actually check out these hip new features, it just crashes my browser, but I'm sure they must be great?

freediver 1y ago

Related: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247782 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=247782

wuming2 1y ago

It has to present text lists, tables and small icons. Makes mobile Safari crawl to a halt. With multi gigahertz, multi core cpus and hardware accelerated js. It is pathetic.

Razengan 1y ago

huh? I never felt it to be slow on Safari, using em for years now.

user94wjwuid 1y ago

I’m usually a fan of going the SPA route. But for something like version control of a code base, the mission critical nature of it, I think should have less frills and serve plain html and css with optional js enhancements

xvilka 1y ago

Just migrate to Forgejo/Codeberg[1][2] or SourceHut[3]. Both are like a light speed compared to GitHub and GitLab. [1] https://forgejo.org https://forgejo.org [2] https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org [3] https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org

pietervdvn 1y ago
My forgejo-server ran on a broken fiber for a few weeks - we're talking about speeds in the single kilobits/s. It kept up fairly well! Pushes and pulls would still kinda work, actions not so much (but that's cause it needed to transfer more then 100MB)
sheo 1y ago
I think Forgejo is great. But we need to remember the fact that many enterprises pick GitHub or GitLab because they provide paid support and SLA. Also Forgejo Actions are still in beta, while GitLab and GitHub are pretty established solutions for CI/CD Sourcehut is basically a really barebones web interface for git server, so I don't think it's really comparable to GitHub For hosting your own projects that's sometimes not a viable solution either. Limiting your open source project to platform other than GitHub hurts it's discoverability, because usually GitHub is what most devs and non devs associate with open source. I heard a lot of "It's not open source if it's not on GitHub". You can mirror your project to GH of course "Just migrate to X because it's faster" doesn't work that well in the real world

blu3h4t 1y ago

Maybe somewhat off topic but my GitHub app on an iPhone haven’t been updating the feed for a few months now, so no have relogged earlier but still the same. Edit: could it have something to do with lockdown mode or how is it called now.

dbalatero 1y ago

I'm begging all the React haters to read the actual link (it's CSS transform).

Suzuran 1y ago

I noticed this awhile ago and assumed it was a deliberate move by Microsoft to suppress use of competing products.

mediumsmart 1y ago

Maybe it just reacts slowly.

MilyMason2 1y ago

[dead]

martinwoodward 1y ago

This should be fixed now. See the thread for more details. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170758#discussioncomment-14248533 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/170758#discuss...

vintagedave 1y ago

I've read comments online (here on HN) that Github has been rewriting their UI in React and that it's got slower since. I have no knowledge if this is true or not (ie React -> speed direct correlation), and my own projects are small enough not to see any performance impact. Does anyone have concrete information?

sleepytimetea 1y ago
They just pushed a new redesigned page for pull request diffs- must have bloated the DOM.
- mtmail 1y ago
  I still see a little "try the new experience" link on the PR diff page (top right of page) so the rollout might be gradual. I won't click.
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    I am such a masochist that I actually click those buttons. If it's good, great, if it's shit, I have time to adjust before they foist it upon me anyway
    - adithyassekhar 1y ago
      I am on insider previews and betas for all apps I use. You're not alone.
    - guappa 1y ago
      I prefer to delay the pain as much as possible instead
  - herpdyderp 1y ago
    I tried it! I like it generally, but it’s too buggy. The whole diff explodes if you expand to more lines (for example). It’s easy to switch back.
1y ago

CafeRacer 1y ago

It truly feels like Jira.

crinkly 1y ago
Wait until you plug it into JIRA, strap copilot and actions on it. Then you can have all flavours of hell at once. Our org has ground to a halt. A lot of the time we just break the branch permissions on the repo we are using and run release branches without PRs and ignore the entire web interface.
- afandian 1y ago
  Just because I went to look it up, I thought I'd share. Looks like Atlassian removed the bit from the Terms of Service where you were prohibited from: > publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products https://web.archive.org/web/20210624221204/https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service https://web.archive.org/web/20210624221204/https://www.atlas...
  - crinkly 1y ago
    I didn't buy it or agree to them anyway :)
Nextgrid 1y ago
It’s afflicted by the same disease: overuse of JavaScript and the need to give JS developers something to do. If you actually load up a ~2015 version of Jira on today’s hardware it’s basically instant.
- slipperydippery 1y ago
  I was reminded how fucked the modern web is a couple years ago when I encountered a so-fast-it-felt-like-local-static-html website dashboard that could have been a "web app", but wasn't. It was being hosted on another continent. It was written in PHP. It was rendering server-side with just some light JS on my end. That used to be the norm.