I still think the merge request UI is great. Its main problems are its slowness and the fact that files with a long diff are collapsed.
As the full merge request is quite slow, I will usually open the diff of each commit one by one, then put review comments as a "per commit" basis.
I've left a few replies in this thread already with more detail of work we have done, is currently in flight and work that is planned to keep improving the overall situation.
As to the collapsed, unfortunately if we loaded all diff lines expanded, the large changesets would make the browser unusable. We're working to lower the memory footprint and have better ways to deal with these large MRs.
One example I can leave you with that we're trying to figure out a way to make this useful as an additional option, is this:
* File by file mode of reviewing MRs, including the concept of "unread diffs": https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/516
We're aware of several of the pain points (we use GitLab to build GitLab ;) ), but if you have further feedback, please leave a comment in the issues and epics I've left here (or create new ones) and feel free to tag me @andr3.
I still think the merge request UI is great. Its main problems are its slowness and the fact that files with a long diff are collapsed. As the full merge request is quite slow, I will usually open the diff of each commit one by one, then put review comments as a "per commit" basis.