Issue links open automatically in a popup · community · Discussion #192666

7 min read Original article ↗

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Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Issues

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In some repositories, any link to an issue form an issue stared to open in a popup overlay instead of navigating to it.

image

Is that something that is rolling out gradually? I checked both the changelog and product roadmap but couldn't find any mentions of the new behavior. Is there a way to turn it off or configure? It completely breaks the experience and negatively affects productivity.

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Thanks for all the feedback, this was something we were trying out as it improved load time for cross-repo links, we are going to revert the change.

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0 replies

This really breaks my experience using AI agents! I click an issue link to copy the URL of that issue to paste into an agent, I get the parent issue link instead!

It looks awful too, I thought at first my browser had glitched and there was a rendering error
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0 replies

Please give us an option to disable this non-standard link behavior. If I click a link it should open and NOT just throw up an overlay.
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I don't want this. It breaks assistive technologies. I want an option to get the old behavior.
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Wow, that's seriously great work on GitHub's side. It looks outstanding, works amazing, should have been implemented long ago, in fact.

should have been opt-in

@ZimbiX Could have been opt-in. Not should......

keep links acting like links.

@ZimbiX links are still links; you can still right-click > open in new tab.

GitHub's quality has eroded since the Microsoft acquisition.

@ZimbiX 50/50 I guess.... for me and my use case, GitHub progressed. But, again, thats only me.....
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0 replies

Not a huge fan. It looks weird with the pop-up not centered in the middle and off to the right (FF 149).

Much more intuitive behavior is just supporting mouse-hover over an issue to get a preview, with click/ctrl-click opening the page.
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0 replies

Please revert this awful behavior. When I click a link on a web browser, I want to go to that link.

At the very least, if you're going to introduce non-standard UX, please provide users with the option to disable it.
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Just another angry user here - please revert this silly feature, or make it opt-in. Terrible UX!
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Another downvote here. This is an annoyance. Please get rid of it.
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Personally I prefer the old way; pop-ups are just annoying to me. I have an ultra-wide
monitor, so with a popup I lose about 20% to 30% of my widescreen, for no real reason
I can see is necessary.

Even if GitHub does not want to revert to the prior default, I think allowing users to
decide at their own discretion what they would prefer, would be better. That way I
could use the old option, without having to use the new variant.

(It is probably also possible to do via custom CSS or so, but that would require
some time investment to prevent a popup and instead use the old issue tracker
way.)

Edit: Oops, misread this, so this is about links. I also agree that the old variant was
better here. Who is making these horrible UI decisions lately?
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Is Microsoft ran by AI slop? Do you even use GitHub yourself? Obviously not.
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So it was not only me then! Please revert this. It sucks.
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Hey, cool feature for people who's browser don't support tabs.
I'm lucky enough to have a browser that does, so I'd rather just have the links open in a new tab.
Thanks.
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1 reply

@PELock

You mean for people on mobile? 100% developers has tabs!

T-minus 10 seconds until Refined GitHub fixes this user-hostile abomination in their next update…
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1 reply

@fregante

We actually already have a feature that "breaks" this modal. They introduced it to more links this week and we're planning to fix it.

Thanks for all the feedback, this was something we were trying out as it improved load time for cross-repo links, we are going to revert the change.
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4 replies

@PELock

So why did you come with this idea at first? Who thought it was a good idea? An AI slop? Or a dude on his iPhone who never commited anything via GitHub? Who is responsible for this stupid idea?

@opticaldrive

GH must have not been very happy with the community response so they deployed someone on a Sunday.

Anyways, nice to hear that community has poked GH into not... slopping more stuff, or en****tification.

@azurenekowo

please at least consider making it a toggle option next time. I can see why y'all have "implementation ideas" but I don't think fetching the issue to display in a popup will increase load time for cross repo PR/Issues than I can just click on the link and it loads in < 500ms.

@dewski

So why did you come with this idea at first? Who thought it was a good idea? An AI slop? Or a dude on his iPhone who never commited anything via GitHub? Who is responsible for this stupid idea?

I was responsible for this going out. The goal was to provide a more consistent user experience in that what happens when you click an issue would be the same in more places where we use the issue viewer (sub-issues on an issue, our dedicated issues dashboard, GitHub Projects, and others). It also meant you wouldn't lose your place when clicking an issue reference when reading a discussion. There were some performance improvements that came with the change too. It was well intentioned, but we hear you, and thanks for the feedback. We missed the mark on this one and it's been rolled back.