Integrated PR submission in Visual Studio had become one of the most requested features - after it had been dropped with the transition from the GitHub extension to integrated GitHub support (https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/cant-create-pull-request-in-visual-studio-with-new/1017696).

In the latest preview they have implemented it now:

• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/create-a-pull-request-in-visual-studio/
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-2022-17-7-preview-2-is-here

Why "require"?  Do you mean because it would it would degrade simplicity?

I'd agree for the search box row. It doesn't need to be visible by default.
But I think the hamburger button could be shown unconditionally - no?

In some (for me rare) cases, it might surely be useful to be able to go through the browser.
A button in the SmartGit PR dialog like "Create on GitHub" would be useful for this.

Another nice improvement would be am additional button right to the "Push" button (or a submenu item for the "Push" button) which says 

"Push and create PR"

Currently, it is required to:

• Push
• Got to the branches tree
• Find the branch to which you have just pushed to
• Right-Click
• Select "Create PR"

With a button for Push+PR all these steps wouldn't be necessary. 

When you have just a handful of branches, this might not seem that relevant, but in some cases, I have like 10 upstream /peer repos and up to 200 branches (I use to keep feature branches for a while to verify possible future blame).

And in such cases, it would be really nice not having to go through the tree to find the right branch for creating the PR from.

I prefer the built-in dialogs for the following reasonss:

1. I'm often doing many things in parallel. Most of the time I have like 3-10 SmartGit windows open, multiple IDE instances, other applications and 5-10 browser windows, each having 5-30 open tabs.
   When SmartGit launches the URL in the browser, it opens in the most recently active browser window in a new tab. This means that I'm losing the tab on which I have been reading most recently.
   And after doing the PR, I need to find that tab again. I don't know exactly for which tab I even need to look for, because I don't always know exactly which of the browser windows it was, so I might even need to look through all other browser windows
   first, to see which tabs are still there to get an idea of the one I have lost thanks to Smart Git.
   => ultimately annoying 
    
2. After looking through the browser windows, I often want to go back to SmartGit again, so I click in the taskbar, and now I need to identify the right SmartGit window where I've been before.
   => more annoyance
    
3. When SmartGit opens the browser for creating the PR, it sets the branch name as the PR title and no message, like it does with the integrated dialog.
   So I'll need to:
   1. switch back to SmartGit
   2. copy the commit message
   3. switch to the browser
   4. paste the commit message
   5. switch back to SmartGit
   6. copy the commit description
   7. switch to the browser
   8. paste the commit description
       
4. In the browser, I need to double check everything, because I always feel it could be wrong. In the SmartGit dialog, it's simple and reliable and I know that nothing will go wrong and I don't need to check anything
    
5. When creating PRs with the SmartGit dialog, SmartGit immediately updates the PRs and I can instantly see from the tree expansion symbols, for which branches I have already created a PR and for which not. This is very helpful when submitting multiple PRs in a row.
    
6. SmartGit remembers in the internal dialog, against which upstream repo and branch I had made the last PR and preselects this for the next PR
   (I’m not sure whether it does that reliably for browser PRs)
    
7. Sometimes I’m logged into GitHub with a different account. Then, the whole thing (going through the browser) doesn’t work at all.