If only Bitbucket wasn't a typical Atlassian disaster it might be more popular. I've never used an Atlassian product that wasn't one of the slowest websites I've ever seen with an over-complicated UX that can only be described as sadistic (have you seen the multiple settings pages?).
Gitlab and GitHub both blow Bitbucket out of the water, it's not even a competition.
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 I believe it when I see it, but it could be that my criticism of GitLab is no longer valid at some point in the future.
Better UI than GitHub and was first to provide free private repos