Lots of hate here. I probably don't use GitHub as much as others here, so I can understand that any change adds friction and people are going to hate that. Having said that, I'm comparing using the Wayback Machine:
and I can't find it in me to dislike the changes they've made. They've removed the double repo navbar in favor of just 1. They've added a right-sidebar that shows various info about the repo in general, like what the last release is. Before, I would open the branch/tag list to look at the versions; now, it's plain as day in the sidebar. For the main contributors, I no longer need to go to insights > contributors. They're shown in the sidebar. For the main languages, I no longer need to click on the thin color line. I find that the most common bits of info about a repo that I sought are now displayed in the main repo page. That's an improvement.
I don't understand why people are complaining like it's an absolute disaster. It's not perfect, sure, but this seems to bring significant improvements.
> I don't understand why people are complaining like it's an absolute disaster.
Partly because the ethos of HN is to reward whoever is the best at disagreeing or pointing out flaws in the original post (or in the comment they're replying to). Which is actually kind of useful, because it allows you as a reader to rapidly see both arguments and counterarguments.
Partly because the most impactful and thus most-upvoted commentary is usually going to be whatever is most extreme. Readers love certitude and are bored by nuance. And if you're expressing a grievance to someone who can make a change, outrage is the best method to get them to prioritize your desires, even if you aren't actually outraged.
Partly because it's in our DNA to ignore the good and focus on the bad. Problems tend to jump out at us, whereas benefits are often invisible by comparison, and we easily take them for granted or consider them merely part of the status quo. For example, we live in a world with the magic of cell phones, air travel, personalized advertising, and social media, yet 99% of what you hear about any of these topics is the negative stuff.
The 2013 version by comparison wastes horizontal space while surfacing less information. The contrast is worse and there isn't enough to visually distinguish the four (!) rows of headers. Personally, I also find the navigation box on the right to be weirdly sunken into the page and I think the color scheme has been greatly improved.
The sidebar it had seems to waste too much space, though. It's just 5 links meant for navigation. They'd be better arranged horizontally. I can agree that it's clearer than what we had a few days ago, having only 1 navbar instead of 2, but that's also because it has a lot less features than GitHub has now.
Tangential comment: I just opened the link with the new design on my phone and it was a delight to look at compared to whatever I saw last time. I think the design changes were made keeping in mind smaller screens, which might be what the user data suggested (how am I to know). But I agree with other comments that the top bar content could be aligned with the rest of the content. Stretching it to each end is causing pain.
Most of us don't use GitHub to actually edit code, either. E.g., some projects are using their GitHub repo as the homepage, so I sometimes end up on GitHub on my mobile phone, too.
Might also depend on how you use it. I have no repositories which I maintain on github worth speaking of, I only contribute, so 99% of time I spend in issue/PR views to which I go directly via links from notification emails.
While as pointed out above the decision of making the top navigation bar span the screen is rather unfortunate, the main thing I see is that instead of the smartphone-centered (or whatever reason) design the central part where the comments are shown is now like 50% wider. Which is something I always wanted because I only use this on desktop and usually with the browser full-screen so finally it takes some advantage of the available space.
However the width used also depends on whether the sidebar is there or not which is quite jarring. I.e. in the toplevel file tree view there's a sidebar. But when you then click on a directory the sidebar is gone and the witdh taken by the tree view expands. That's not ideal and just jarring when going back and forth. So for cases like that, it's not merely the fact there was a change which causes friction, it's really the new version which does.
Looking at the repo's main page on a smartphone. The top "box" listing the latest commit message says:
"torvalds committed 20... [...]"
What the ...!!!
I don't know if that was a "streamlining" or has been always like this. Still, makes me wonder at how the UI team prioritizes their efforts.
I don't depend on using GH UI much, so will figure my way in the refaced UI at some point. But I can relate to the sentiment here that the refacing is just the recurring "design tax". Like the cars from 2015 look "so dated".
What's the deal about the round corners? I thought the straight ones were proclaimed the "right way".
That might be an unpopular opinion, but I loved the double repo navbar.
I've discovered the redesign when I wanted to check the latest commits of a git project I haven't cloned yet.
My very first reaction was "oh, there's a CSS issue" while Ctrl+F5 the page, then opening it in a private window to see if one of my extensions somehow broke the page.
Then it took me a full minute to find the link to the git history, while my eyes basically searched in every corner of the screen.
I really loved the old GitHub UI, it made GitHub a better product (in my opinion) than GitLab. And I really didn't like the experience I had while trying the new one.
new:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux
old:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200619163555/https://github.co...
and I can't find it in me to dislike the changes they've made. They've removed the double repo navbar in favor of just 1. They've added a right-sidebar that shows various info about the repo in general, like what the last release is. Before, I would open the branch/tag list to look at the versions; now, it's plain as day in the sidebar. For the main contributors, I no longer need to go to insights > contributors. They're shown in the sidebar. For the main languages, I no longer need to click on the thin color line. I find that the most common bits of info about a repo that I sought are now displayed in the main repo page. That's an improvement.
I don't understand why people are complaining like it's an absolute disaster. It's not perfect, sure, but this seems to bring significant improvements.