DEV-TOOLSApril 26, 20261 min read5 views

GitHub unwanted UX change: issue links now open in a popup

GitHub is facing backlash after implementing a UX change where issue links open in a popup overlay instead of navigating to a new page, disrupting developer workflows.

Replies: 11 comments

| Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with us! Your feedback is invaluable as we build a better GitHub experience for all our users. As a member of the GitHub community, your participation is essential. While we can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented, we want to emphasize that your feedback is instrumental in guiding our decisions and priorities. Thank you once again for your contribution to making GitHub even better! |

| 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 |

| 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. |

| This is ridiculous and really should have been opt-in if done at all. GitHub's quality has eroded since the Microsoft acquisition. Don't baby us - please keep links acting like links. |

| 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. |

| 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. |

Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Feature/Topic Area

Issues

Body

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

Source: Hacker News

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