I wondered if someone would mention that this time around; it is a really bad piece of slow javascript that shows completely whacked-out graphs though, because it is trying to show the "fork" feature from github (and doing a poor job), not really the gitk or log --graph output of anything.

Yes, first-parent and expand would be a good way to view history. Github is a website and should be providing new and interesting ways to view information, not failing to provide even the basic lowest-common-denominator view (the gitk view).