I too thought I was going crazy when I noticed it this morning... Funny, but that shade (or one very much like it) is forever etched into my brain as "porn blue" thanks to a k10k issue back in the day when the internet was still referred to as the information super highway and nobody knew what we were doing. Here's an excerpt from the first "lesson":

    You must never use this colour.
    You can like it as much as you want.
    You can buy a dress in this colour for your girlfriend.
    Your mum might have it as the colour of her eyes.
    Feel free to paint your house like it.
    But never use it on a website. Never.
    This colour is the porn colour. 
    You must never copy the porncolours.

Source thanks to Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20050404141942/http://www.k10k.ne...

Still cracks me up.

EDIT: for those who have no idea what k10k was, here's the story: http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/kaliber-10000

Oh man I forgot about K10k. Was an amazing site.

AKA "Blueprint blue," source of the term "blue movie" and "working blue."

2005 wasn't that long ago. I thought the press stopped using the term "information super highway" in the 90s. But in case thanks for share that, it was an amusing read.

I think that particular issue is older though, I'd guess 1999 or 2000. If I recall correctly people were still going on about the information super highway around that time, along with very literal illustrations of "surfing the web." 2005 is just when the snapshot is from I think.

What is the porn color? I don't understand the reference. What makes it "the porn color"?

Aren't links blue (#0000ff) by default?

I believe that's the reference right there. Porn sites, along with most other sites, were usually not quite as spiffy as they are these days. Aside from some creative hot spots that really overdid it with the GIFs (geocities 4 life!) most sites were typically just browser defaults with perhaps some changes to background colors, maybe add a nifty tiled background image and such. Web design (not to mention development) was quite different back in the late nineties, early naughts, than what it's like now – the default blue link color was everywhere.

This whole issue is effectively a sarcastic response to that lack of design, and referring to the default blue as "the porn color" I read to mean "don't be cheap and stick with the defaults; don't be a porn site."

The joke doesn't age very well, but it was really funny back then.

It's "blueprint blue" - a reference to the cheap printing process used to make the posters for pornographic films, and also the reason they got the nickname "blue movies."

Today I learned – thanks!

From the above Internet Archive link, looks like the color is #0033FF.

I love it! Everything is suddenly so readable. And no, I am not colorblind.

I don't share the disgruntled feeling toward the color.

The new color is #0366D6, while the old color is #7FA5CF. The new blue color is far more saturated and is much less light, but is actually still a pretty big step down from ultra-hard blue #0000FF. IMO, it's much more readable than the previous blue and stands out nicely.

Exactly. The 0366D6 against the hover background of f6f8fa provides a 5:1 contrast versus the old 2:1 contrast.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Here are the diffs for the two CSS files I found between yesterday and today in case anyone cares.

github.css: https://www.diffchecker.com/STyCXVyk framework.css: https://www.diffchecker.com/x1uMGh3h

This is for colourblind people.

Still doesn't make it look good. If thats an issue they could always have an optional setting to enable colorblind mode.

I think we should give it a few months to see if the fact that it doesn't look good is inherent to the color or just because we've become accustomed to it looking one way for so long. I can't count the number of interface redesigns I've seen in services I used that I hated at first and now I look back at the old design and can't fathom how I ever thought it was better.

And if colorblind people aren't inconvenienced (and don't have to navigate to a menu to de-inconvenience themself) then that's enough of a reason for me.

Fair enough.

Side note: I'm surprised there isn't a specific header browsers could send for something like colorblindness. That would allow sites to react to that header and serve up a different stylesheet.

Isn't that what the accept header is for? Telling the server what content types you're willing to accept, including relevant parameters. Something like:

    Accept: text/css; color-blind=trichromatic

Of course no server would recognize this today, since afaik the CSS media type doesn't define any parameters other than perhaps `charset`, but the mechanism is there at least. Also any self respecting web server would just ignore the parameter so it shouldn't break anything, just cost a few more bytes of bandwidth I guess. No need to invent a new header I don't think.

Why not have colorblind mode be the default? Much more courteous to make the nitpickers change their mode than casual browsers who just want to be able to use the site.

This is for sure a requirement for us governmental customers as they require certain accessibility requirements from used products.

Serious question: How does making something WAY MORE GREEN make things more visible for people who CAN'T SEE GREEN?

In the same way that turning up the volume helps people who are hard of hearing to hear. Colorblindness is a spectrum, not a switch; many people who suffer from it simply have reduced sensitivity to a color. I'm mildly colorblind myself; I can see green, but I can't see it as well as you can.

Upvoted because this is a legitimate question.

I'm slightly grey-green colorblind, and if you make text standard CSS green (#008000) I sometimes have trouble telling that it's actually green and not dark grey. If you make it just a little more green (say #00A000) it's much easier for me to see.

That's not how colorblindness works. Green things aren't invisible to colorblind people. They just can't discriminate some colors from others as well. I would guess that this color is more different from the body text in some color channel that's extra useful for contrast for colorblind people.

It should be an opt-in thing then. How many of us are not colorblined?

I believe the color of the green buttons also changed.

yeah, and they have a more visible border now as well. The purple colour of the "Merged" icon also looks different to me.

I actually like the blue text, contrast.

Thanks for that comment, I'd been clearing browser caches and trying to debug my overridden styles, I'd assumed something was horribly broken.

Ha, glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Not only that but why would you change the clean top bar? The dark one that is live for weeks now is worse than the old one.

That and the eye-seering blue draw too much attention for what they are. Content is de-emphasized. Whole page is slightly harder to read. I don't understand these changes at all.

I agree the blue is really hard on the eyes.

The merge request buttons/general purple color also pops quite a bit more today.

Maybe this is all a build up to April 1st.