Github's site is really fast. Many of the pages it displays are dense with information and I think it displays everything well, for example viewing diffs in Github is very good, it smartly wraps all the text so you can view everything on the screen and everything loads fast. Try comparing it to Bitbucket's diff view, which can't wrap text amongst other things. It's light years better in comparison. It looks good at any window width with little wasted whitespace.

Amazon's site works pretty well. Their product range is quite a mess to navigate but I've never been annoyed much by their front end. It seems pretty well engineered, eg. [1]

[1] https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...

On the whole GitHub's UI is good, though I still find it unreasonably difficult/slow to do a review commit by commit compared to kiln.

I'd really like it if they added a way to thumb between commits in one click without page loads, kinda like flipping through pages of a book

What do you find lacking about GitHub's frontend?

For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example:

* say you're on page A

* navigate to page B

* navigate to page C

* click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B

* the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar

* so you click back again

* now your on page A, completely skipping page B

* clicking forward takes you back to C

Additionally, GitHub is insanely slow. This page, for example, takes 3 seconds to load: https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe6622...

Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.

The page switch fuckery I'm noticing is not quite as severe as what you described, but still annoying:

* say you're on page A, an open pull request

* merge the pull request

* switch to a different site entirely

* go back to github's page A

* notice how it shows the pull request as if it wasn't merged yet

* refresh the page and see the status switch to merged

I'm using Firefox and I've never tried reproducing this on Chromium.

For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks).

Back and forward work great on GitHub. My mouse has additional buttons for these.

> For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks).

My machine: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6850K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 128 GB RAM on Ubuntu Linux 20.04.

> My mouse has additional buttons for these.

Similar. As a sibling post mentions, the history hijacking does some nasty stuff -- unless you're lucky or something, I guess.

What browser are you on? The navigation issues don't happen for me on Chrome.

The latest Chrome. This has been a problem I've experience for years.