I think that GitHub has a much better UI than GitLab. GitLab is slow and bloated compared to GitHub. Requiring Javascript for browsing the code repository is just bad design.
GitLab employee here. As much as it pains me, I have to agree with you for the most part. Performance is one of the biggest pain points for our frontend team, but is something we're actively working on.
We're in the process of migrating parts of our codebase from haml templates to Vue apps, which does have the unfortunate downside of requiring javascript to run. We're looking into solving this with server side rendering, but it's early days right now.
Well, that's interesting information. I believe it when I see it, but it could be that my criticism of GitLab is no longer valid at some point in the future.
Here's one of our epics to show our progress: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/716
We're in the process of migrating parts of our codebase from haml templates to Vue apps, which does have the unfortunate downside of requiring javascript to run. We're looking into solving this with server side rendering, but it's early days right now.
Here's the issue for that: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215365
If either of these things are things you could help with, we encourage you to contribute and help us make GitLab a better place.