The past, present, and future of UI at GitHub
87 comments
·January 24, 2025simonw
plorkyeran
I would guess that the number is pulled down significantly by streaming services and a lot of home broadband connections are 95% TV service, and wifi connections for phones at home is just a bonus.
jwalton
There’s no small irony that this isn’t age doesn’t render correctly on Safari on iPhone. All the text wraps off the right edge of the phone. -_-
hawksley
No kidding! This is my first time experimenting with converting Keynote slides into HTML, so I'm not surprised it didn't go perfectly. I just pushed a quick fix for the overflow issue but should probably figure out a longer-term solution.
Daedren
The text is still overflowing off the right side of the screen on my 13 mini
aurareturn
>That number seemed surprising to me - I actually expected the portion of mobile-only internet users would be significantly higher than that.
Gen Z is likely higher. Older generations will still use a laptop.
In lower income countries, this number is also higher. Many people do their entire job on their phone. Email is not used often for business. It's chat apps.
koolba
> So the 15% is people who use the internet exclusively via LTE/5G without paying for home broadband.
Does that factor in people “borrowing” their neighbors WiFi?
lazyasciiart
Or college kids using campus internet?
glhaynes
That seems like a weird way to measure it in an age of streaming TV.
nsm
I am curious to understand what bearing "lots and lots of regular people solely use their cellphone to conduct consumer transactions" has on GitHub, whose audience is significantly different than median and cannot otherwise function without a laptop/desktop.
a1o
I don't know but I really wish it was possible to have the web desktop in mobile, GitHub has a terrible app that can't do anything and even worse mobile view. In the past it was possible to tell it to run the desktop version of the website with the browser setting but this isn't possible anymore. I have a very big phone, it's screen has a ton of pixels, just give me a grown up UI exactly like the desktop instead of the dumbed down, way too zoomed in whatever thing you are offering on mobile.
alex-robbins
It's very possible. Firefox for Android has a "Desktop site" switch in each tab's menu that works fine, including for GitHub.
dariusj18
Chrome does too
simonw
I frequently use GitHub on my phone, making edits to my projects using their web edit button. And I have a very decent laptop.
I wish Codespaces worked better on mobile! It would be great to see them invest more work in that.
Anecdotally I've heard that there are people out there who have successfully learned to program entirely on mobile devices.
bigstrat2003
If it works for you then great, I guess. But that sounds like the equivalent of using nail clippers to mow the lawn. You're forgoing a good tool for an absolutely terrible tool.
lolinder
What exactly is your use case for doing edits on your phone? Are you making these edits while out and about without your laptop (in line?) or do you actually avoid getting your laptop out even when it's close by?
simonw
Usually tiny things like typo fixes on web pages or in my documentation.
Occasionally I'll ship feature changes to my JavaScript apps, usually copy and pasted over from Claude.
rendaw
I've been blown away by amazon/gcp/azure whose uis progressively waste more and more space. I actually measured it, and on a normal (11"?) laptop screen the list of vms occupied something like 15% of the screen space, the rest being sticky pannels, banners, sidebars, toolbars, etc. Combined with "resizable" panes that are restricted to max 30% of the parent area size I can see between 1 and 2 lines of results. Not desktop/laptop, they don't even work on laptop.
I reported it in those offline "please rate the new ui" feedback popups, but it's clear that they have no idea who use their UIs.
fleekonpoint
Even using the AWS Console on a 13in screen is painful
formerly_proven
I long for the late 2000s/early 2010s style of web administration UIs which tried to sorta-kinda look like a desktop app, they'd have things in like, tables trying to be like LVS_REPORT where you'd rarely have to scroll and rows were 14 pixels high etc.
Nowadays stuff like this is a sea of divs with an ocean of margins and padding. Or just straight up card-based layouts.
hawksley
This presentation was more about industry trends than GitHub specifically. My point here is that as time in apps becomes a greater portion of the average user's time on the internet, the more poorly-built web experiences will stick out.
freeone3000
If the “mobile” app had feature parity, maybe we would not be so different from the median? Github has cloud development tools; why can’t I use them with the keyboard and mouse connected to my phone?
ZeWaka
I imagine because practically 0% of the population have mice and keyboards attached to their phone. You can go to vscode.dev and similar on a phone web browser if you really wish.
zwieback
Github is the worst of the web GUIs I use regularly. Started bad and only got worse, luckily 99% of my gitting is via PC based tools. Maybe this is the kind of app where the GUI should be modeled on client side developer tools and not modern web UIs.
Trasmatta
Historically I've thought the GitHub web UI was great - clean, usable, simple. Over the past couple of years it's started to get more and more feature bloat, to the point where it's becoming less usable.
Aeolun
I feel like file browsing and pull requests actually got better? That’s what I use 99% of the time.
Projects is a mixed bag, but not terrible. I feel like Github is generally good at making things as complex as they need to be, and no more.
zwieback
I've only used Github desktop briefly so I can't say much about it, was commenting on the web UI. I suppose if I was using a lot of GitHub functionality vs. just using github.com as a repo things might be different and I'd give Github desktop another try.
Trasmatta
Sorry, that's what I meant actually, the web UI. I said desktop to differentiate it from the mobile web UI, but I realize that was the wrong way to say it because they also have a desktop app.
justinclift
Ugh. GitHub's UX has been getting so much worse over time. :( :( :(
They even completely break super basic things that used to work fine.
For example, if you want the direct download url of (say) an image file in your repo you used to be able to hover over the "Download raw file" button and the status bar would show you the url.
But no, no any more. It's now some kind of javascript button bullshit and there's no way to get it to show the actual download url. Clicking it at least downloads the file, but the history entry is messed up "blob:..." and also doesn't show the download url (using Firefox).
Because at GitHub they clearly can't leave alone the things that actually work, and need to change things just for the sake of change. Seriously not impressed. :( :( :(
cobertos
Using availability as a metric for UI bugs is great. After all, UI is just an API for humans, and it breaking breaks workflows.
> These unique kinds of UIs have less convention and unique accessibility characteristics that are expensive to solve. But a lot of the time, our budget should be zero. To build it with what we have already. To copy-paste.
If you build UIs like this, you end up with the sort of one-size-fits-all UIs no one likes. Like when Twitter (and others) consolidated their desktop and mobile UIs into one mobile-first one that works worse on. You waste a bunch of space and information density, lose eye scanning ability, for the benefit of higher developer velocity. It must be carefully applied. Things like shipping address forms (example from article) or yes/no modals are a great place for standardization but trying to assemble those pieces on a single page, or show something slightly different and you're back to square one.
---
Didn't we try to standardize some of this already? Isnt this why <input>s are derived from the OS and why alert() and prompt() exist? And default style sheets? And no one wanted this! Browsers have opened up _everything_ to be customized, capitulating to designers. And even with all that customization, some things like HTML5 validation still feel like theyre missing pieces.
madeofpalk
For building as a part of an overall product, I agree that the budget should trend towards zero, not away from it.
It should be easy to make things “look like GitHub”, but still possible to build new outside-the-box experiences where relevant.
airstrike
Stats about general internet usage should mean very little to GitHub since it is used by a specific subset of the population which I'd wager is way more heavily skewed towards laptop/desktop
Also shouldn't they be able to just know this based on traffic? Why the need to use third-party general research as a source rather than "Our traffic patterns suggest X"?
TheRealSteel
Yeah. Looking at stats without context of their audience is what caused the Xbox One disaster. They saw a huge number of hours on Xbox 360 being used for watching streaming shows, so they thought that was all anybody cared about, ignoring the fact that their audience still bought the device as a game console and that alot of those hours were relatives and housemates.
hedora
The 360 was a better streaming box than the one.
The one was a crap console all around, but Microsoft’s auth BS is what finally got both of them stuck in our attic. More recently, this happened with minecraft.
GitHub recently forced me to turn on 2FA over SMS. Now they’re running a banner telling me that it has all the problems that were the reasons I didn’t want to turn it on, and telling me to turn on some other 2FA instead.
hawksley
The mention of general internet usage stats was in the context of broader industry trends influencing overall consumer expectations.
airstrike
Sure but GitHub users are developers, not "consumers" in the general sense, so that mention doesn't really apply.
aragilar
Slide ?42? (https://hawksley.org/img/posts/2025-01-08-past-present-futur...) also hints at some level of disconnect, what's the number of users accessing GitHub via Linux?
xnx
Glad to see some discouragement of custom design systems. I shudder at the person-hours that have been squandered on that fruitless endeavor. Pre-web, essentially zero time was spent on "design systems", and we were all better for it.
Groxx
Pre-web there are plenty of "human-computer interface" documents / guides / etc. And UX research and demos (e.g. The Mother Of All Demos).
Pre-software there are plenty of "design of everyday things" books, schools of thought, movements, etc.
This is nothing new, aside from our current state being driven by a recent surge.
xnx
Absolutely. The work of user experience research has a long history and is very important. What is new is every single "app" (website) inventing their own entire conventions and "language". This still happened with desktop apps, but it was rare typically limited to the largest players (Microsoft, Adobe). You can do a tremendous amount with basic, bog-standard, GUI widgets if you apply them well.
anon7000
Part of the problem is that we just don’t have a std lib, or std UI framework for the web. In both Windows and Mac, the basic UI happy path involves using the pre-built libraries and UI components these companies created to make apps somewhat consistent. There is nothing like that for the web — which is part of what the article gets at.
m3047
A discussion thread which won't die:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/135572
How do I make the comments stop? It's noise at this point. My comment isn't in my own account page under "contribution activity". There's no way to search for the comment in the actual discussion thread and trying to search page source for e.g. the username doesn't do any good because not all comments are shown by default; changing the sort to "top" doesn't work because, even though I only got 2 upvotes (and 1 emoji), the initial display still hides the majority (221 out of 251) of items to display lower priority stuff at the bottom... and besides it's broken and threads aren't sorted strictly according to any interpretation of "top" I can muster.
esprehn
I believe this is misinterpreting the app usage trends. While the number of minutes on mobile is heavily skewed to apps (ex. 90%) the time is also spent in a very small number of apps (ex. Instagram or YouTube). It's not clear how that trend applies to something like GitHub or developer tooling in general.
binary_slinger
I would like to see renewed focus on supporting the user to be able to customize the UI to their liking. This is sorely missed in design systems and web apps. Everything is GitHub at the whims of a UX designer that did some “research”.
internetter
> Which is all to say, that mobile is the new baseline.
> 15 percent of U.S. adults only access the internet through a mobile device.
Absolutely nobody is using GitHub exclusively from their phone. As an aside, this site doesn’t work on mobile.
> But there is a bigger problem. Why are there so many design systems in the first place?
Because homogeneity is boring. I read the article linked about the global design system:
> Many — or even most! — web developers shouldn’t need to understand many close-to-the-metal HTML concepts in order to make web applications function
Next they’re gonna say that web developers shouldn’t need to know how to code. HTML isn’t low level.
> For the love of God, why is there more than one way for me to provide my shipping address on the internet?
For fun? The screenshot shows 3 perfectly good looking forms. I have never ONCE struggled to input my address into a form.
ZeWaka
> Absolutely nobody is using GitHub exclusively from their phone.
As an OSS maintainer, I do quite a lot of issue triage and simple PR review via the GitHub mobile app, which has gotten better by leaps and bounds in the past 3 years.
> I have never ONCE struggled to input my address into a form.
The different ways forms treat secondary addresses can be a real pain, if you have one of those.
andygocke
I guess people have different experiences as I don’t see the React changes as improving the mobile experience: just the opposite. I often interact with GitHub by browsing through the file tree and various links. But the new react renderer breaks the back button. So often when I’m browsing and hit back, I leave GitHub entirely instead of going back to the parent directory.
cjk
Between the back button issues and the horrible sluggishness on many repo and pull request pages, the React switchover has seriously degraded what used to be a great experience. Not just on mobile, but on desktop as well.
meixger
Same. The broken back navigation needs more attention. Upvote here https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/75889
> According to Pew Research https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ 15 percent of U.S. adults only access the internet through a mobile device.
That number seemed surprising to me - I actually expected the portion of mobile-only internet users would be significantly higher than that.
Turns out the 15% number means something slightly different. From that Pew Research page:
"Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone but say they do not subscribe to a home broadband service."
So the 15% is people who use the internet exclusively via LTE/5G without paying for home broadband.
(I'm surprised that number isn't higher as well.)