On Wednesday, 29 July 2015 at 16:00:35 UTC, Alex Parrill wrote:
> `git clone` can take awhile with large repositories, like mono.

Also not all people have a decent Internet connection, so it's just impractical to wait 10 minutes just for one file. For example, the only option I have at home is 4 Mbit ADSL, and it sucks big-time these days. The general principle applies to everything, not only to browsing sources: the less networking you have to deal with, the better. So being able to view a single file online instead of cloning the whole repository is a win, as well as downloading individual packages in a package manager instead of downloading recent system images.

And of course, you can get a single file from a Git repository, *if it's explicitly enabled in there* : http://stackoverflow.com/a/1126333/888720
But do you really want to type something like:
$ git archive --remote=git@github.com:foo/bar.git --prefix=path/to/ HEAD:path/to/ |  tar xvf -
?

Obvious stuff is so obvious.