7 ms·

Issue links now open in a popup

242 points by luckman212 5mo ago

luckman212 5mo ago
If anyone knows someone at GitHub and can tap them on the shoulder, please ask them to revert this terrible change.
- verdverm 5mo ago
  Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
- rvz 5mo ago
  Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
binarybee 5mo ago
Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.
cebert 5mo ago
I wish they’d focus on making their platform reliable and more stable.
- kernc 5mo ago
  Why would they care to empower competitors?
mikkelam 5mo ago
Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.
willio58 5mo ago
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.
- simonw 5mo ago
  UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.
  - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
    The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career). I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.
    - chuckadams 5mo ago
      Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.
      - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
        I don’t agree, but that’s design, people have different opinions. I actually like the Ribbon interface, would have liked it more if they added a search box to it as well but designers hate search boxes.
red_admiral 5mo ago
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon. *the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
- fmorel 5mo ago
  There's already something like this for GitHub: https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github
  - normie3000 5mo ago
    Thanks for sharing - loads of great ideas there for the GitHub team.
HeavyStorm 5mo ago
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users. Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out. Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.
- denverllc 5mo ago
  > A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.
- nemomarx 5mo ago
  Can you actually show us this research and a/b testing?
- the_gipsy 5mo ago
  I guarantee you it's not preferable to the majority of github users.
- yxhuvud 5mo ago
  Except there was a different comment from someone that actually knew how it came around, and it was an ugly performance workaround.
qwertyforce 5mo ago
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 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188 no reaction
add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
I still don't understand what's the point of any full screen popups are
Delgan 5mo ago
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-Z9Ozu6N https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O... [2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discussioncomment-16611662 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...
shevy-java 5mo ago
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab, as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub here. This is epic.
mwalser 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  They should also order the comments in order of recency top to bottom so you have to read the page in reverse.
leni536 5mo ago
Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.
- geerlingguy 5mo ago
  This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
  - c-hendricks 5mo ago
    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 5mo ago
      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)
      - zerd 5mo ago
        Also it breaks copying links. If I want to link to an issue I copy the URL. But now there's two different issues open at the same time, which one am I linking to? Original? Popup? Both?
      - c-hendricks 5mo ago
        Right, not saying it's not annoying, but "every intuition about using a browser" is a bit over the top. A link can open a dialog, has been happening for decades.
kreyenborgi 5mo ago
It took me a while to realize it was not a bug. Utterly insane that this went through QA.
- Telaneo 5mo ago
  > Utterly insane that this went through QA. Big assumption you're making there.
  - dewski 5mo ago
    All new features are gated behind feature flags that progress from the developing team, to all GitHub employees, then to public over a multi-week span. Larger changes like this one have an internal discussion post shared with the company and a changelog entry once published.
    - Telaneo 5mo ago
      I'm not sure that's all that much better. I'm not sure what's worse. There not being QA, or things just flowing right through QA. I guess still the former, since when there is QA, it's probably still filtering off some of the insanity. It's just that it's never seen by the greater public.
rochacon 5mo ago
And they pushed this as every major browser introduced a "Split View" feature... I get this issue preview on Projects, although I don't like it there either, but as a hook on any issue link is just terrible UX, zero benefits IMHO.
janaagaard 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  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 5mo ago
  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?
naikrovek 5mo ago
This is why I kind of think that UI/UX should be handled by normal developers who do other things as well. People whose sole job is UI/UX must do things like this in order to stay employed, normal developers don’t. So teach normal developers how to think about UI and UX so that changes stop happening solely because a specialist needs to change something that does not need changing. Sorry, UI/UX people, but if you were proceeding towards some finely crafted experience, you’d have honed in on it by now. You would have a set of rules that could be followed to present information in both a pleasing way and a useful way simultaneously and everyone would know how things work because everyone followed the same rules. None of that has happened. You are just changing things to change them.
dboreham 5mo ago
Super annoying when I saw this. Initially I assumed I'd strayed into some quadrant of the UI space I hadn't been in before. But no they just broke it for no reason. Well, presumably the reason was someone expected to get a bonus.
Figs 5mo ago
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.
Matt138 5mo ago
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]
- Neywiny 5mo ago
  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 5mo ago
    Navigation within a repository does not reload the page, only the section below the header.
    - BlackFingolfin 5mo ago
      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.
      - geerlingguy 5mo ago
        Yeah over the past six months I've trained myself to just hit Command-R every time I switch back to a GitHub issue tab, otherwise things get stale or broken far too often.
  - mvdtnz 5mo ago
    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.
crazygringo 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  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.
gardnr 5mo ago
They keep adding “fancy” UI and hijacking standard browser behaviour that is infuriating on a daily basis. Please consider a lofi version for people that want to select text without navigating to a different page.
akersten 5mo ago
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.
nfw2 5mo ago
Being able to see a detail view without navigating away from the list view is a better user experience and the more common practice now
- dewski 5mo ago
  I was responsible for this going out. The goal was to provide a more consistent user experience in that what happens when you click an issue would be the same in more places where we use the issue viewer (sub-issues on an issue, our dedicated issues dashboard (https://github.com/issues https://github.com/issues), GitHub Projects, and others). Like you mentioned, you also wouldn't lose your place when clicking an issue reference when reading a discussion. There were some performance improvements that came with the change too. It was well intentioned, but we hear you, and thanks for the feedback. We missed the mark on this one and it's been rolled back.
  - self_awareness 5mo ago
    Did you get feedback from users that this change is needed? Or was it your (GitHub's) idea and initiative/vision?
    - nfw2 5mo ago
      This is feedback from me, a user, that the change was beneficial
drewbeck 5mo ago
If there's two things HN hates it's UX designers, PMs and off-by-one errors. As a UX designer I have to laugh: one of the most important parts of building good UX is humility and a willingness to be wrong. The confidence with with many on HN assert that they know what the right UX is for any app is exactly the same error that bad UX designers make. As always in product the user's frustration is real and important but their ideas for a fix are almost never the best choice for the product, the company, or most users.
thayne 5mo ago
I don't hate the change iself. But I do hate that it is inconsistant.
eleventen 5mo ago
I noticed this feature earlier in the week and found it helpful and intuitive. I suspect they tested this well and most users liked it. GitHub usually has top rate UX. Performance is poor and there are a million other reasons to beat up on GH. This is not one of them.
dangoodmanUT 5mo ago
shift+cmd click is the macos shortcut for "open this link a new tab and go to that tab" Works on these psuedo links all over github
flexagoon 5mo ago
Wow, I'm surprised everyone has a very negative opinion about this. I liked it when I saw it for the first time, seems pretty convenient to me. Kinda like Zen Browser's "glance" tab but built into github.
atlasagentsuite 5mo ago
[dead]

242 points by luckman212 5mo ago

luckman212 5mo ago

If anyone knows someone at GitHub and can tap them on the shoulder, please ask them to revert this terrible change.

verdverm 5mo ago
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
rvz 5mo ago
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.

binarybee 5mo ago

Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.

cebert 5mo ago

I wish they’d focus on making their platform reliable and more stable.

kernc 5mo ago
Why would they care to empower competitors?

mikkelam 5mo ago

Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.

willio58 5mo ago

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.

simonw 5mo ago
UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.
- cjbgkagh 5mo ago
  The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career). I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.
  - chuckadams 5mo ago
    Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.
    - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
      I don’t agree, but that’s design, people have different opinions. I actually like the Ribbon interface, would have liked it more if they added a search box to it as well but designers hate search boxes.

red_admiral 5mo ago

There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon. *the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked

fmorel 5mo ago
There's already something like this for GitHub: https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github
- normie3000 5mo ago
  Thanks for sharing - loads of great ideas there for the GitHub team.

HeavyStorm 5mo ago

This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users. Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out. Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.

denverllc 5mo ago
> A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.
nemomarx 5mo ago
Can you actually show us this research and a/b testing?
the_gipsy 5mo ago
I guarantee you it's not preferable to the majority of github users.
yxhuvud 5mo ago
Except there was a different comment from someone that actually knew how it came around, and it was an ugly performance workaround.

qwertyforce 5mo ago

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 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188 no reaction

add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago

Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.

NooneAtAll3 5mo ago

I still don't understand what's the point of any full screen popups are

Delgan 5mo ago

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-Z9Ozu6N https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O... [2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discussioncomment-16611662 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...

shevy-java 5mo ago

Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab, as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub here. This is epic.

mwalser 5mo ago

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 5mo ago
They should also order the comments in order of recency top to bottom so you have to read the page in reverse.

leni536 5mo ago

Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.

geerlingguy 5mo ago
This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
- c-hendricks 5mo ago
  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 5mo ago
    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)
    - zerd 5mo ago
      Also it breaks copying links. If I want to link to an issue I copy the URL. But now there's two different issues open at the same time, which one am I linking to? Original? Popup? Both?
    - c-hendricks 5mo ago
      Right, not saying it's not annoying, but "every intuition about using a browser" is a bit over the top. A link can open a dialog, has been happening for decades.

kreyenborgi 5mo ago

It took me a while to realize it was not a bug. Utterly insane that this went through QA.

Telaneo 5mo ago
> Utterly insane that this went through QA. Big assumption you're making there.
- dewski 5mo ago
  All new features are gated behind feature flags that progress from the developing team, to all GitHub employees, then to public over a multi-week span. Larger changes like this one have an internal discussion post shared with the company and a changelog entry once published.
  - Telaneo 5mo ago
    I'm not sure that's all that much better. I'm not sure what's worse. There not being QA, or things just flowing right through QA. I guess still the former, since when there is QA, it's probably still filtering off some of the insanity. It's just that it's never seen by the greater public.

rochacon 5mo ago

And they pushed this as every major browser introduced a "Split View" feature... I get this issue preview on Projects, although I don't like it there either, but as a hook on any issue link is just terrible UX, zero benefits IMHO.

janaagaard 5mo ago

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 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
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?

naikrovek 5mo ago

This is why I kind of think that UI/UX should be handled by normal developers who do other things as well. People whose sole job is UI/UX must do things like this in order to stay employed, normal developers don’t. So teach normal developers how to think about UI and UX so that changes stop happening solely because a specialist needs to change something that does not need changing. Sorry, UI/UX people, but if you were proceeding towards some finely crafted experience, you’d have honed in on it by now. You would have a set of rules that could be followed to present information in both a pleasing way and a useful way simultaneously and everyone would know how things work because everyone followed the same rules. None of that has happened. You are just changing things to change them.

dboreham 5mo ago

Super annoying when I saw this. Initially I assumed I'd strayed into some quadrant of the UI space I hadn't been in before. But no they just broke it for no reason. Well, presumably the reason was someone expected to get a bonus.

Figs 5mo ago

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.

Matt138 5mo ago

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]

Neywiny 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
  Navigation within a repository does not reload the page, only the section below the header.
  - BlackFingolfin 5mo ago
    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.
    - geerlingguy 5mo ago
      Yeah over the past six months I've trained myself to just hit Command-R every time I switch back to a GitHub issue tab, otherwise things get stale or broken far too often.
- mvdtnz 5mo ago
  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.

crazygringo 5mo ago

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 5mo ago
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.

gardnr 5mo ago

They keep adding “fancy” UI and hijacking standard browser behaviour that is infuriating on a daily basis. Please consider a lofi version for people that want to select text without navigating to a different page.

akersten 5mo ago

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.

nfw2 5mo ago

Being able to see a detail view without navigating away from the list view is a better user experience and the more common practice now

dewski 5mo ago
I was responsible for this going out. The goal was to provide a more consistent user experience in that what happens when you click an issue would be the same in more places where we use the issue viewer (sub-issues on an issue, our dedicated issues dashboard (https://github.com/issues https://github.com/issues), GitHub Projects, and others). Like you mentioned, you also wouldn't lose your place when clicking an issue reference when reading a discussion. There were some performance improvements that came with the change too. It was well intentioned, but we hear you, and thanks for the feedback. We missed the mark on this one and it's been rolled back.
- self_awareness 5mo ago
  Did you get feedback from users that this change is needed? Or was it your (GitHub's) idea and initiative/vision?
  - nfw2 5mo ago
    This is feedback from me, a user, that the change was beneficial

drewbeck 5mo ago

If there's two things HN hates it's UX designers, PMs and off-by-one errors. As a UX designer I have to laugh: one of the most important parts of building good UX is humility and a willingness to be wrong. The confidence with with many on HN assert that they know what the right UX is for any app is exactly the same error that bad UX designers make. As always in product the user's frustration is real and important but their ideas for a fix are almost never the best choice for the product, the company, or most users.

thayne 5mo ago

I don't hate the change iself. But I do hate that it is inconsistant.

eleventen 5mo ago

I noticed this feature earlier in the week and found it helpful and intuitive. I suspect they tested this well and most users liked it. GitHub usually has top rate UX. Performance is poor and there are a million other reasons to beat up on GH. This is not one of them.

dangoodmanUT 5mo ago

shift+cmd click is the macos shortcut for "open this link a new tab and go to that tab" Works on these psuedo links all over github

flexagoon 5mo ago

Wow, I'm surprised everyone has a very negative opinion about this. I liked it when I saw it for the first time, seems pretty convenient to me. Kinda like Zen Browser's "glance" tab but built into github.

atlasagentsuite 5mo ago

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