What always amazes me is the lengths to which a company will go to hide information, and the lengths to which it will go to create complex workarounds to show it again.
This is Jira's new design (not to be confused with last year's new design, or with the pervious years' new designs).
When you go into ticket details, all dates are relative. Because remember folks, there's no difference between a shitty social network such as Twitter or Facebook and a productivity/developer tool.
But wait! They *know* it's not what people want. So there's a helpful tooltip to show the actual date.
But wait! They *know* it's still not what people want, so now you can click it and it will convert to actual dates.
But wait! They *know* this is the actual thing people want. That's why there's no tooltip on the actual dates saying "X seconds/days ago".
And yes, these pretend to be links when you hover on them (because yes, a pointer cursor means a link). And of course they are not. To add insult to injury, you are reasonably expecting a permalink to this comment here. Of course, they just removed permalinks to comments entirely.
And yes, your choice doesn't persist. Click to show proper dates, close ticket details, open details again, we're back to relative dates.
And just think how much work went into this: calculate relative dates in real time, click handlers that keep track of all dates on the page and change them back and forth, tooltips with actual dates etc. etc. Probably took two months to design, and two weeks to implement. When it could've just been a regular date.
via @ashaeron