I'm sorry to hear you don't like the UI. What do you think we should improve? BTW Technically GitLab is not a SPA, it uses turbolinks to do page loads.
Basically I just don't like some "features" which are anti-patterns IMHO:
* With SPA I mean that clicking on a link, my browser doesn't load a new page, but rather some JavaScript seems to do it.
* Depending on the browser width, the description of the icons on the left disappears. It should always be there, I'd rather have a horizontal scrollbar than not knowing which button does what.
* Fixed headers. Vertical screen space is the most important thing to me, so there should be nothing on the top blocking the stuff I want to read. Also please don't start to animate it or let the header slide in when I scroll up.
* Infinite scrolling.
* Icon fonts. I don't like the default font. If I block it, some icons don't work anymore.
1. What is the problem with this? Back links and everything else should still work. And it saves a lot of time.
2. I agree the user should be able to override and made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13436
3. Where do we do this?
4. I don't think infinite scrolling is always bad.
5. What do you suggest we do instead? PNG's for all icons are expensive to load.
1. No, "everything else" doesn't still work. You're reimplementing a browser in JavaScript! For example: There's no spinning loading indication on the left side of my tab. When clicking on a link and pressing back while it's loading, it doesn't abort, but goes back instead.
3. Do you mean the animation? You don't do this yet.
1. I agree that these browser functions are broken. I think the speedup is worth it but that is personal. BTW Turbolinks are a default feature of modern rails apps, doesn't mean they are right but they are common.
3. We don't plan to do this either as far as I'm aware.
5. Icons in SVG would be nicer but that looks like a lot of work.
- We're introducing some more pagination over infinite scrolling. If we see this is successful, we might continue that trend
- eventually we will replace the icons with svgs, probably when we switch to our inhouse icons. There is no due date for that, though.
