Here's a good example of what I mean, taking a change from ChromiumOS's Gerrit versus a random patch on Phorge (a fork of Phabricator which uses a similar workflow):
- https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/third_...
The Gerrit one is really busy in my opinion, while the Phorge one gives the page a lot more breathing room, which I think just makes viewing it much easier and less intimidating. Despite that Phorge is still good for power users: it shows all the needed information, has hotkey shortcuts for fast navigation, nice diff viewer, nice side panel with all diffs listed, etc.
I'm trying to set up Gerrit right now and the really compact UI is honestly my main complaint. Maybe someone who's better at UI/UX can give more refined comparison or analysis, but the nice, "bigger" design of Phabricator/Phorge's diff viewer is something I really miss. (I also like the "untabbed" design of Phorge, contra GitHub; all the comments, changes, and code is on one page, instead of having to click back and forth between comments and diffs.)
It was a lot easier to show how contributions stacked, to continue iterating on a “branch” while waiting for a review from the team, and worked better with trunk-based development workflows.
Gerrit seems to have a lot of extra features in it that make it extra confusing to me. Critique has a lot of features but all of them feel more like intuitive extensions on top of a code review platform (ex: attention set https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch19.html). Gerrit seems to have a lot more going on in a much smaller (cramped IMO) UI.
Gerrit is not a bad tool but it is somewhat hard to get used to if you have the more common GitHub-flavored git experience that most software engineers have these days.
I expect if the goal is to get the most vibrant contributor community possible the best thing would be to move to a GitHub-first workflow where Gerrit is supported as a backup. But there’s too much inertia for that to ever happen.