God it went downhill lately. It can take 20 seconds on a decent machine for it to load all the shitty plugins i dont even need but still block me from using a mailbox..
Loading "html only" version is pretty much instant and has everything I need to use the demn mailbox..
In fact, I'm pretty sure Github is rendered server side for the first load. You shouldn't be seeing any spinners. I'd check if I wasn't on my phone.
Sure, the list of my repositories is server rendered, but I already know my list of repositories. The thing I'm waiting for 99% of the time when loading github.com is to see if there's any new activity.
Sorry about the graphical glitches, blame nvidia or xorg or gnome or something.
What they actually did was continue loading the content statically, then hide it behind a 1 or 2 second loading spinner that wasn't actually loading anything.
Seems like users have just come to expect spinners...
(I don't know how the site currently works, haven't been there in a long time)
Browsers are awesome at rendering HTML. They render each element the instant just the necessary bytes have crossed the wire. Browsers can't help you if you need to first load the HTML, then load the scripts, then load the complete giant JSON blob from your API, then add the elements to the DOM.
I'm in Norway, with high ping to the US. My ISP isn't the most reliable all the time. That nice server you have 0.01ms ping to, where you can't notice the difference a few extra roundtrips makes? Well, each roundtrip might take an extra few seconds for me.