Most active commenters
  • agos(4)

←back to thread

The GitHub website is slow on Safari

(github.com)
446 points talboren | 16 comments | 27 Aug 25 09:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
Show context
PedroBatista ◴[27 Aug 25 13:10 UTC] No.45039192[source]▶
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 ].

replies(17): >>45039249 #>>45039365 #>>45039680 #>>45039841 #>>45040328 #>>45040430 #>>45041105 #>>45041125 #>>45041207 #>>45042280 #>>45042385 #>>45044131 #>>45046133 #>>45048521 #>>45050100 #>>45051138 #>>45062005 #
bob1029 ◴[27 Aug 25 13:14 UTC] No.45039249[source]▶
> 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.

replies(10): >>45039310 #>>45039407 #>>45039686 #>>45040388 #>>45041936 #>>45043631 #>>45048845 #>>45049190 #>>45051019 #>>45051373 #
1. agos ◴[27 Aug 25 13:29 UTC] No.45039407[source]▶
if you look at the thread, the explanation is not this easy, as much as it's satisfying to blame React (or any other single tech)
replies(5): >>45039679 #>>45039778 #>>45042874 #>>45043242 #>>45051016 #
2. bob1029 ◴[27 Aug 25 13:52 UTC] No.45039679[source]▶
You're right. The technology is not necessarily flawed. It is more about the people who decided to use it and the way in which they used it.
replies(1): >>45039835 #
3. cryptonym ◴[27 Aug 25 13:57 UTC] No.45039778[source]▶
That comment was about overall slowness of the site, not a specific issue on a specific browser.

Available data confirms that SPA tends to perform worse than classic SSR.

replies(1): >>45039821 #
4. agos ◴[27 Aug 25 13:59 UTC] No.45039821[source]▶
I'm pretty sure that if they rendered/updated the same insane amount of nodes with some other technology, for example PJAX like they used to do, performance would not be better
replies(1): >>45039981 #
5. agos ◴[27 Aug 25 14:00 UTC] No.45039835[source]▶
exactly. I don't want to do a "no true scotsman" to defend React, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they wildly misused the tool
replies(2): >>45041699 #>>45042753 #
6. cryptonym ◴[27 Aug 25 14:09 UTC] No.45039981{3}[source]▶
Agree you can shoot yourself in the foot with pretty much any technology. By design, it's much easier to be inefficient with SPA frameworks.
7. throw-the-towel ◴[27 Aug 25 16:20 UTC] No.45041699{3}[source]▶
A tool that lends itself to misuse so easily is a bad tool, period.
replies(2): >>45049805 #>>45051642 #
8. xcrunner529 ◴[27 Aug 25 17:51 UTC] No.45042753{3}[source]▶
So PHP <6 was a great language?
replies(1): >>45043459 #
9. fouc ◴[27 Aug 25 17:59 UTC] No.45042874[source]▶
We're not specifically blaming React. we're blaming their approach to React/SPA and how it caused a massive degrade compared to Github's Rails-based UX.

Github's code view page has been unreasonably slow for the last several years ever since they migrated away from Rails for no apparent reason.

10. Zanfa ◴[27 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] No.45043242[source]▶
Not once have I seen a site go from SSR to SPA and been pleasantly surprised. It always trends towards worse in responsiveness and overall UX.

I’m sure you could make something work better as a SPA, but nobody does.

11. zerocharge ◴[27 Aug 25 18:48 UTC] No.45043459{4}[source]▶
The front-end is usually just a thin layer on top of a database, sometimes with backend services (queues/processing). Having a bad language on the front-end actually helped. You don't want to write code because of the bad language, you write less code, less code is less bugs. You had to be invested to increase the lines of code. It's like the hard chair of programming languages. If you don't want programmers to dwell there, bring the hard chairs.
replies(1): >>45049982 #
12. agos ◴[28 Aug 25 08:28 UTC] No.45049805{4}[source]▶
why do you say "easily"? it took them considerable effort to make that atrocity, I'm pretty sure. The fact that tens of people worked on this and yet this is the result is way more telling of the team and company culture than it is of the specific tool.
13. guappa ◴[28 Aug 25 08:58 UTC] No.45049982{5}[source]▶
Have you not seen the internet these past decades?
replies(1): >>45053083 #
14. dbalatero ◴[28 Aug 25 11:49 UTC] No.45051016[source]▶
Yeah, if they read the actual link, the issue is CSS transforms on each line of code, not React.
15. sgarland ◴[28 Aug 25 12:59 UTC] No.45051642{4}[source]▶
Not necessarily. Sharp tools are often sharp because someone needs it.

I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.

16. zerocharge ◴[28 Aug 25 15:02 UTC] No.45053083{6}[source]▶
It's meant in a tongue in cheek way. Day to day I develop in C# and Typescript/React using all the latest bells and whistles. Long for the simpler times though. The time before product managers, Scrum and ticket driven development. All the tickets drive the complexity that maybe shouldn't exist. Hard to push back against feature requests when it's a one-way street.