Comment by superkuh 3 days ago
>frontend barely works without JavaScript, ... In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't.
And the github frontend developers are aware of these accessibility problems (via the forums and bug reports). They just don't care anymore. They just want to make the site appear to work at first glance which is why index pages are actual text in html but nothing else is.
In answer to my own question about in-depth decision making, I just found this presentation from February 2025 by seven-year GitHub veteran Joel Hawksley: https://hawksley.org/2025/02/10/lessons-from-5-years-of-ui-a...
Relevant quote:
> But beyond accessibility and availability, there is also a growing expectation of GitHub being more app-like.
> The first case of this was when we rebuilt GitHub projects. Customers were asking for features well beyond our existing feature set. More broadly, we are seeing other companies in our space innovate with more app-like experiences.
> Which has led us to adoption React. While we don’t have plans to rewrite GitHub in React, we are building most new experiences in React, especially when they are app-like.
> We made this decision a couple of years ago, and since then we’ve added about 250 React routes that serve about half of the average pages used by a given user in a week.
It then goes on to talk about how mobile is the new baseline and GitHub needed to build interfaces that felt more like mobile apps.
(Personally I think JavaScript-heavy React code is a disaster on mobile since it's so slow to load on the median (Android) device. I guess GitHub's core audience are more likely to have powerful phones?)
For contrast, gitea/forgejo use as little JavaScript as possible, and have been busy removing frontend libraries over the past year or so. For example, jquery was removed in favor of native ES6+.
Let them choke on their "app-like experience", and if you can afford it, switch over to either one. I cannot recommend it enough after using it "in production" daily for more than five years.
I honestly believe that the people involved likely already wanted to move over to React/SPAs for one reason or another, and were mostly just searching for excuses to do so - hence these kind of vague and seemingly disproportional reasons. Mobile over desktop? Whatever app-like means over performance?
Non-technical incentives steering technical decisions is more common than we'd perhaps like to admit.
What's nuts about that presentation is that the github frontend has gone from ~.2 to >2 Million lines of code in the last 5-6 years. 10x the code... to get slower?
What does "app-like" even mean? It's a website, not an app. Don't they have a native app for phones?
> My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.
I very much hope not, but fear you're right.
I'm (theoretically) an iPhone app developer, and I really dislike the Reactive idiom: I can see the theoretical benefits, but in practice, the magic glue has never worked right, and comes at a painful performance cost. React is to me what LLMs are to LLM-skeptics.
I'm retraining anyway due to LLMs and how well they eat UI, but I don't yet know where I'll end up next.
It is a very real accessibility problem if you're using Dillo, which does not support javascript.
This is in the context of where that web browser is hosted, so it's quite relevant.
Why should you need JavaScript to render text and buttons? Were browsers unable to do this prior to the JavaScriptification of everything?
It's 1 step forward 2 steps back with this "server side rendering" framing of the issue and in practice observing Microsoft Github's behaviors. They'll temporarily enable text on the web pages of the site in response to accessibility issues then a few months later remove it on that type of page and even more others. As that thread and others I've participated in show this is a losing battle. Microsoft Github will be javascript application only in the end. Human people should consider moving their personal projects accordingly. For work, well one often has to do very distasteful and unethical things for money. And github is where the money is.
To be fair, the developers might care, but upper management certainly doesn't, and they're the ones who decide if those developers make their rent this month.
I'd love to hear the inside story of GitHub's migration of their core product features to React.
It clearly represents a pretty seismic cultural change within the company. GitHub was my go-to example of a sophisticated application that loaded fast and didn't require JavaScript for well over a decade.
The new React stuff is sluggish even on a crazy fast computer.
My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.
But maybe I'm wrong and they made a technical decision to go all-in on heavy JavaScript features that was reasoned out by GitHub veterans and accompanied by rock solid technical justification.
GitHub have been very transparent about their internal technical decisions in the past. I'd love to see them write about this transition.