I've heard this opinion echoed a lot (esp on Twitter), but I don't agree with it at all. I think Github is still an amazing piece of software, and Microsoft has invested in it more than almost any recent acquisition from any parent company.
This feels like a quite dramatic framing for a bug that popped up in a very complex piece of software.
It's not a bug, though. Like many web sites these days, they don't load the entire page upon navigation as a deliberate design choice to save bandwidth and resources of the client browser.
I've been bitten by this one before as well. Looking at the files tab of a pull request, I hit ctrl-f and started typing the name of a file I knew was part of the PR, and...nothing. No hits. Couldn't find it.
It wasn't until I scrolled down a little bit that the JS on the page loaded more of the diff and THEN the file I was looking for appeared in the list and could then be clicked to scroll to that file.
This kind of lazy loading saves system resources for both client and server, but reduces usability.
> as a deliberate design choice to save bandwidth and resources of the client browser.
The complete source file is likely a tiny fraction of the size of the React gunk to show it.
It's more they're trying to limit DOM size than download size, with a virtual view. And, unfortunately, HTML virtual views break things like find-in-page.
This pattern is so frustrating - especially when they capture the hotkey for find in page but not until js has fully loaded. Makes me wonder if exposing the browser find events to the page could help - handle the find event by ensuring the whole dom is loaded and searchable.
I feel "Github is still an amazing piece of software" and "GitHub has annoying bugs it really shouldn't have" are not really conflicting opinions; they can both be true at the same time.
I use GitHub because it's still the best option, by quite some margin.[1] But I also think it has stupid bugs (that sometimes take ages to fix), some misdesigns, and at times complete misfeatures.
For example if you have a light colour scheme the GitHub actions log is shown as fairly low-contrast dark. This is quite unreadable for me; there's a reason I use the light theme. So I need to open the 'raw log' and check it from there. Is this doable? Yes. Do I absolutely hate having to use GitHub Actions because it's just such an annoying workflow? Also yes.
GitHub discussions is borderline useless. Try commenting on a larger thread; you'll struggle finding your own comment and seeing if anyone replied. Making a conversation UI that's more confusing and worse than Twitter is quite the achievement, but GitHub pulled it off.
Some of this is just mystifying; these are not new features, and pretty low-hanging fruit. Just like how the back button behaviour was just broken on issues for like half year or longer until they finally fixed it.
[1]: I haven't evaluated Gogs/gitea/Forgejo in a while though. Also the entire double fork thing is somewhat unfortunate.
This feels like a quite dramatic framing for a bug that popped up in a very complex piece of software.