GitHub unwanted UX change: issue links now open in a popup

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

It will probably suffer the same fate as the most-upvoted discussion of all time in the GitHub Community repo: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

no reaction

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.

I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].

They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...

Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O...

[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.