Oh god. It has a pleasant color scheme, but this is an awful idea. By trying to recreate windows and bookmarks in the web app you're at best just implementing redundant features and getting in the way of the native browser features by trying to showcase yours, at worst breaking regular web usage entirely.
Take their right click menu for items to select whether you want an in-app tab or real browser tab. Congrats, you've broken UX by making the native browser right-click menu unavailable on link items, and because you've only implemented this on some things most of your content is not deep linkable as navigation is a cursed in-app feature.
This is as usual a fun tech demo, but it should not be used for anything in the real world.
Without a doubt. Interesting idea and nice looking UI. But like you said it's creating a browser within a browser, without all the native browser support.
I found the navigation to be scattered and disorienting. In general clicking links opens new windows. In one case it navigated away from the current "page" and what I believe to be the back button (looks more like undo) didn't do anything. Why am I guessing what constitutes a page and how or if I can go back? Everyone has known how these things work in browsers for decades.
I really admire Posthog as a company and how they run things there. Big fan. But let's be honest. This website redesign, even though cool and unique, wouldn't work if they were an unknown brand. I think they have done a great job building a solid brand over the years and now have the freedom to update their website however they want.
If you are a no name startup, doing something like this will be a bad idea. My 2 cents.
As I'm reading about their scrolling philosophy, my hand gets tired and I switch to keyboard scrolling.
Oop, there is none.
I will never laud an application that breaks the most basic of keyboard functions. You can design a clever and flashy application with pointer-only UI, but you can't design a good one.
I used to be in-charge of homepage getting over 1.5M views a day. I would really be curious how this converts. I am assuming Posthog has a lot of metrics.
If I were to bet, while this is fun, it will be a disaster for conversions once the launch hype goes away.
The best of both worlds would be a different subdomain that serves up the same content but as a conventional site, like how old.reddit.com does it. Then you get to keep the neat gimmick, but have a fallback for users that can’t stand it.
People have been doing this for years but it's always an experiment or a demonstration that it's possible. It's slow, it's bloated and it is the opposite of what people actually want, which is quick information.
Why don’t you read why they did that. Instead you responded with your own reasoning without countering or responding to there reasoning. I actually agree with you but the article has actual points that you didn’t bother to read or reference.
Like this:
Frankly for a site like this efficient use of space and multi tasking isn’t as important for a front page. A front page needs to be optimized to be in your face to understand what posthog is in as little time as possible then give you optional pathways to dig in for more detail. A website that’s like an OS is too busy, it’s optimized for productivity and I still have no idea what posthog does exactly.
Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts.
But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large SaaS products, and also being the target audience for such websites (director or VP Eng): the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.
I could see immediately they have 34 products under 7 categories; 5 are popular, 4 are new. If I want to try out one: Docs > Product OS > Integration > Install and configure > Install PostHog.
And if I wanted to learn a bit about their engineering: Company > Handbook > Engineering > Internal Processes > Bug prioritization.
Each of these interactions took only seconds. And I could switch between the product overview page I opened earlier and the pricing page I just opened, without waiting for any entire website to reload (or having to right click, open in new tab, and then scroll).
As I said, there is something here beyond just aesthetics. And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile.
i can remember a discussion with Cory (who built this with Eli, the front end eng) on the topic of "why do all websites consist of a collection of long scroll-y pages / is that appropriate for our business?" and we concluded it wasn't optimal.
at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)
a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in <3 seconds, and all of the internet is going for that. our company doesn't fit into 3 seconds, or if it does it's annoyingly vague "a whole bunch of devtools"...! so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do better. it will mean _some_ people bounce and that's ok, because those that stick will (sometimes!) love it.
as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.
> the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.
The menu bar is one of the most effective and proved UI pattern. Unfortunately, on Linux we have an entire desktop environment that ditched the menu bar for hamburger menus, which are one of the most ineffective UI pattern.
I would be more cautious in generalizing this feeling. To me that interface feels daunting and cognitively taxing, compared to a CLI or command palette.
This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.
> the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.
The web catches up to the past again. :-) Despite all the modern attempts at simplified "delightful" interfaces, a well-structured menu bar is hard to beat.
I think it’s the other end of the consumer web vs power user design spectrum.
Using an OS requires familiarity and cognitive effort. Tapping oversized buttons… less so.
There’s been a long trend (definitely as far back as the first iPhone release, maybe further) of every product release adding more white space, bigger elements, and overall reducing information density.
If your target is consumer web, the “don’t make me think” approach is probably still correct. But anyone who’s ever looked at a Bloomberg terminal knows there are still times when you designing for the lowest common denominator is the wrong play.
A company with a large suite of technical-ish products might be a place to experiment with alternative paradigms. That said, I poked at the site for a few minutes, then had to ask an LLM what PostHog actually does.
This only goes to show how badly designed are most websites. They're almost created like you don't have a computer, needing to resign yourself to paper-look-alike technologies with just a little bit of annoying effects that don't add anything to the experience.
If I recall right, they have most everything in the same CMS, in particular their discussion/help forum is integrated into their main site. To me, that's what the difference is, having done similar work in the past. They have a unified and singular control over the content on their front page. It's not a dozen groups obviously jockeying for control of who gets to be higher on the page or featured more prominently, or just a portal for taking you to subdomains of each department. I don't think you can build a website like this if you don't have that CMS behind it unifying everything together, and I don't you can have a CMS like that unless you insist on it very deliberately organizationally, as the tendency in every org is towards sprawling feudal estates ruled by vp's.
>probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts
Very little here that isn't explained by age-old HCI concepts on design.
>And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile
Nope. You see the "X" stands for experience. And nothing ever betrays it's own name. You're just a computer nerd that nerds too hard to get it. You've probably even used a terminal without bellyaching for the next few days. What could you know about what normies want? *cough*
> As I said, there is something here beyond just aesthetics. And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile.
It's almost like, "marketing", itself, as a concept, is user hostile. Most sites' purpose isn't to be efficient, or informative. It's to give the impression that they are "making a statement" (we matter because XYZ), while looking dependable and professional enough to compel calling sales for more.
Commercial transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I have all the price details I need?). Technical transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I can tell precisely how this compares to market leaders and competitors?).
So, in many (mostly despicable) aspects, this site is terrible. Unfortunately.
I've always thought ‘multi-document interfaces’ as we used to call them are an anti-pattern. I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in?
(Mind you on mobile I very much don't have a perfectly good window manager, and indeed can't even open multiple instances of most apps…)
As a long time Mac user, MDI has always felt like a stopgap to make up for the OS not having the ability to manage windows on a per-application basis (so for example, being able to hide all windows belonging to a particular application or move them all to another desktop/screen).
It also feels very foreign on macOS - Photoshop suddenly gained the MDI-type UI in like CS4 or something, after having let windows and palettes roam free on macs since Photoshop’s inception. I always turn it off, feels claustrophobic somehow.
Compared to the experience of something like “Gimp”, I prefer something contained to a single window.
Otherwise two or three such apps running at the same time becomes a game of “where’s my window”. I hate the idea of a toolbar being its own window to be managed.
> I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in?
Because some applications do need multiple windows in the same application context. A common example would be image editors.
It is unfortunate that almost all generic MDI implementations (Win32 and Qt basically) are incredibly barebones. I want to have multiple windows visible when i'm using Krita, for example, but Qt's MDI support (that Krita does use) is worse than what Windows 95 had.
To throw gasoline on the fire: this how I’ve always felt about tmux. Why use an incomplete in terminal windowing system when I can just have multiple terminal windows open managed by the superior OS window system.
(That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
I think the issue is partly that most OS window managers really don't seem to optimize for having a dozen small windows on your screen in the way that the custom window managers in, say, art software or CAD software, often do. Mainly in terms of how much space their title bar takes/wastes.
>why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in?
You answered your own question, because a lot of applications work across multiple platforms, and if you want to have control over the experience because you don't know what capacities the OS's window manager has you need to abstract it away.
Nearly every UNIX command has its own way of formatting output, be it into columns, tables, lists, files, or TTYs (and windows, à la emacs, screen, other curses-based utils...). Even `ls` has a table formatting logic to it. This keeps the UNIX native abstraction relatively simple; everything is "just text." But the ecosystem, being quite rich, actually has a lot of divergent requirements for each utility. If that was avoidable, we probably would have seen some other abstractions appear on top of "just text," but we similarly haven't.
Would you extend that argument to tabbed interfaces as well? Why should browsers support tabs (and an inconsistent interface by each vendor), when you can just open a new window instead?
Nice idea, awesome implementation, but please no. I now need to learn a new UI and UX, I have to to organize windows inside my windows. I want websites to be more like a block of text rather than a super fancy interface.
Very much this. I already have an operating system, and it's very good at managing windows, I spent quite a lot of time setting it up so that it would do so in exactly the manner I want it to.
Agreed. Closer the website to the single chunk of text, easier it is to customize for the user agent (think reader mode, dark mode, accessibility). This won't apply to every website, but this is what I expect from blogs - block of text.
It's neat but it runs like a dog. I opened a couple of things and tried to move the window... I'd take a statically generated bunch of webpages over this. If you're going to make one of those multi window webpages looking thing, make it good.
To note, in the past, this was a big no-no because SEO was important. You had to have good SEO for search engines to index your content efficiently and show up well ranked in search results...
Now, well, that ship has sailed and sank somewhere off the west coast...
What are you using that's causing performance issues?
It runs like a dream when playing with the first window. When opening a second window and dragging it around it stutters for a second then resumes back to full speed and every window after is full speed. (I'm assuming that's the browser going: "Oh wait, they really are using those functions every frame, let me spend a moment to optimize them so they're as fast as possible for future executions)
I love the website. It stands out amongst a million vanilla SaaS marketing sites all using the same section stack template.
But nobody will actually use it the way they describe in this article. Nobody is going to use the site enough to learn and remember to use your site-specific window management when they need it.
Idk, the UX seems really self-evident to me. Also it’s fun. I usually click away from this kind of product immediately but I stayed on this for provably 5-10 minutes just snooping around to see what it was all about.
- Moving a "window" around takes 29% of my CPU, and renders at about 2 fps
- I'm losing about 40% of my screen height for reading (14" laptop screen). So much so none of the article is visible above the fold, just the title and by-line.
- My browser's CMD-F finds things on layers hidden under the current window
- Changing window size via corner drag is also selecting text on other windows, no prevent default.
- Xzibit says: Tabs are bad, so we put some tabs in your tabs?
> PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie
You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
Exactly. If they indeed only use the cookie for essential functionality, this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying.
Even worse: because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people, they are actually fighting for the right for worse sites to spy on their visitors.
> You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
Isn't it even simpler: Unless the cookie is used to track, you don't need the banner? For example, a cookie used to remember sort order would not require a cookie banner, I think.
I’m interested to hear which country forces a cookie banner for any cookie, because the EU only requires it for tracking cookies and this website does net specify whether it’s used for that purpose.
I’ve created websites with a cookie banner “because it’s required” even though there were no cookies involved. The idea that every website needs a cookie banner is more hurtful than the cookie banners themself.
Considering they have a login system, I'm going to guess that the cookie includes your login (probably in JWT form), which automatically makes it essential to site functionality. Which means the banner is there just because if it was absent, someone would say "Hey, where's the cookie banner?"
In other words, it's not actually legally required in their case, but it's practically required, because it lets everyone know that the absence of the banner is not a violation of the law.
I love this website but yeah that banner really bothered me. 100% appreciate the effort to reduce cookies & the commitment to avoid 3rd-party, the tongue-in-cheek "legally required" flies completely in the face of all that effort - especially given it's misinformed & not in fact legally required at all.
>Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
No, this is conflating "GDPR consent" and the ePrivacy Directive. According to ePD the banner must always be shown if the company providing the service is based in the EU
Different jurisdictions differ. Even if you collect your own and it contains identifying points, laws like GDPR will require you to attain informed consent before you collect it, along with methods for people deleting their data, and a million et als.
Where people who’ve never started a company or spoken to a lawyer about GDPR, the ePrivacy directive, the schrems rulings, etc but just emotionally love idea of what they think it represents (but actually doesn’t), debate with normal sane people.
All I can say is, I’m getting really tired of this one guys.
As someone who worked many years in web development and always was annoyed by bad UIs, this one is outstandingly good. And im not just talking about the "lookalike" itself, which is very clean and structured. Also the usability and how it "feels" to use the website is the closest to any "browser fake os" page i've ever tried (and i tried many...) - literally the only thing i was missing (and thats nitpicking on the highest level) - was when i right clicked the background that the context menu didn't have a "refresh" that i could click which sure would have no usefull effect but it would have my "using a desktop" feeling 100% round :D
Yeah. I found pictures of feet before I found their products.
I guess they assume visitors usually arrive at the home page rather than a blog post. A quick note/link in the blog post might be helpful for those of us stumbling around.
"This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors."
I played around with this for a while and couldn't actually derive any useful information from it.
As someone who doesn't know posthog, this was basically impossible to navigate. The UI and theme is cool, the widgets are fun and well styled, but I couldn't actually figure out what I was supposed to be doing, what I was supposed to be reading, what meaning I was supposed to take away about a company (I'm guessing) that makes products (again - guessing).
People have been making websites exactly like this since the 90's.
Every single one of them have ultimately been massive failures, because you are re-inventing the wheel and putting a window system that you control to sidestep the window system that I control.
Reminds me of some often-repeated suggestions that take the form of "every developer should build their own X" where X might be: blog, ORM, key-value store, database, OS, distributed computation framework, neural network, decentralized currency. But the one that you really have to be afraid of, in terms of time-spent followed by a new life-long obsession is "your own keyboard".
After closing the window, which is an approximation of a page, the back button does not return me to the previous page in Firefox. I can see that the address bar is changed but the content doesn't change back to that page. After clicking through to another view I can use the back button to achieve this basic functionality.
This is a cute way to build a lander. It may result in more sales because it invites the user to interact and experiment with the novel layout.
So, in short, this is because window management under macOS sucks big time (and under Windows, still leaves much to be desired), and because tabs in Chrome become indistinguishable if you open a couple dozen, since they are on top, instead of on the side (Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side). Watch legacy UI concepts that are so ingrained that people often don't notice how counterproductive they are.
The PostHog interface tries to somehow alleviate that, but still follows the Windows model a bit too faithfully. Also, bookmarking becomes... interesting.
This is because people are so used to tabs that they forgot they can open new browser windows. For a long time I configured my browser not to use tabs, because most of the time when I open two or more pages I want to see them simultaneously.
Edge has had side tabs (aka Vertical Tabs) for years now. I don't personally see a single reason to use Chrome over Edge. And I spend most of my time in MacOS.
> Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side
regained. And I don't think it was a long break at all. tree organization for those side tabs, now that took a lot of time to regain, after they ripped API used by TreeStyleTabs extension.
We're here to help product engineers build successful products Literally every piece of SaaS that a product engineer needs. This includes tools for building products, talking to customers, and making sense of all your customer data. PostHog is a single platform for people who build things.
This is literally just a verbose way to say "we're a company that does stuff"…
Wouldn't it be better if the about me page actually had some concrete information inside it…?
Even with normal web designs this is frequently my question as well. It's always a bunch of business speak about solutions and enabling. So I think that question has less to do with the website design and more to do with their choice of messaging. "We’re building every tool for product engineers to build successful products." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My goal on a webpage for specific product information is simply to extract data and leave. I have zero interest in learning a new immersive UX for a task that should take seconds.
The modern web's obsession with maximizing engagement and time on page is fundamentally user hostile. It creates a frustrating experience for anyone viewing the web as a utility rather than just a source of entertainment.
You can just use your native windowing system to achieve what you want, instead of implementing a poor version of one with clear accessibility issues within a browser window.
Sadly, me too. We must share the fun-hating gene, or somesuch.
It's not a bad website either, the layout is really well done and it sells the branding. I just don't trust it to be accessible, as I only ever click through sites to find text content. Something about it feels like putting a Christmas tree in your bathroom for the sake of branding.
Ok, but if they have a bog-standard site like everyone else then they're not going to look any different than everyone else, which would cause users to leave.
I love this. Internet UIs have completely degraded over the last decade and seeing an actual company decide to try something different is beautiful. I barely see devs or designers try anything new. This team even added a screen saver if you leave the tab open and inactive for a bit! Wonderful.
Very neat! I was delighted to see that "drag to side of screen" tiled the window using that half of the screen. Then I opened a new window, and I was (unreasonably) surprised to see that there wasn't a tiling window manager that put my second window in the other half of the screen.
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what looked like an operating system. The desktop isn't the OS. Windows and Mac only allow one desktop on their OS, but Linux makes the separation clear.
There are cases of companies providing something very close to a full OS for the focused use cases such as the Bloomberg Terminal.
But imagine if such a thing existed purely for marketing and informational purposes. "Curious about Hooli GAN Labs? Just download our Docker image to run our bespoke informational kiosk software..."
I'm curious how well this will do. Marketing websites are extremely important for first impressions (unless you're Berkshire Hathaway [1]). Although this is impressive and unique, it took me a minute to get over the "learning curve".
Reminds me of Jakob's Law, "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know" [2].
But given your target audience is developers, this might actually do well.
I really like this. Side note: It has real BeOS vibes in my opinion, and that's a compliment.
I remember seeing another submission from PostHog on here a while ago, I think it was about transparent pricing? Anyway, I would definitely want to use them if I was founding a startup.
That'd be great if I could navigate the in-browser browser with my pgup/pgn or arrow keys, but I can't. If you're going to go this route, you really should do comprehensive accessibility testing.
The former website's version was genius.
This new version is genius too, but for totally different reasons. It's so creative, funny, beautiful and technically advanced. It's also extremely hard to understand globally. I find it awesome to push things forward, but considering how different the UX is from a standard website, and how confused I've felt during the navigation, I wouldn't copy this version as much as I copied the other previous versions.
That's so fun! It brings back the excitement and nostalgia of home computing in the 90s. It's also pretty useful and I buy the justification for why it's helpful.
I haven't tested it much but the site seems surprisingly snappy & usable even on mobile – except for… the browser back button?! In Chromium & Firefox (both on Android) it keeps bringing me back to the top of the previous page and does not restore my scroll position. That seems like a rather large oversight?
EDIT: Ok, I take back the "usable" part. This is insanity. I have found links that don't do anything. Some links open in overlay popups (some of which get cut off on mobile), others in new "windows". The X button behaves erratically (or at least not as I would expect), clicking on the page title in the headers sometimes opens menu, sometimes it doesn't. There's a WYSIWYG editor bar at the top of https://posthog.com/changelog/2025 even though I'm not editing anything(?!) and the "undo" button(?) looks like a browser refresh button(?!), though I'll have to admit I initially thought this might be a back button, since there's also that forward button.
On the Posthog dashboard, you can activate a chatbot 'hog' which walks around the screen, but you can control it with WASD, and even jump up onto 'ledges' that correspond with the divs of the page you're on. There's a hidden "party mode" where you can see/chat to your other team members' hogs!
I would give anything to have a linux window manager that looks and behaves just like this. I said this to my coworkers in slack and they said that my age is showing, which is probably true. everything on this website is so easy to find, it just feels good. icons and color scheme is perfect as well.
As a side note, I like how at the bottom it says "legally required cookie banner" which ironically is not required by law. You don't have to have a cookie warning if you only use 1st party cookies for website operations (which is what this looks like).
IMO this is nothing more or less than a successful marketing stunt, I suspect once it gets the reach it can get, they will replace it with something less radical.
Very cool growth hack idea and I admire the fact that they were able to pull it off, as crazy as it is.
The UX problem with emulating windows within web pages is that if you do it convincingly enough (like this website does), the users will unconsciously use windows shortcuts, like alt+F4 to close the window, which closes the whole browser.
This is amazing work. But you ask what are we doing/can't we figure out a better way to consume content and my feel from this is what are we doing here - building AOL? Lost in the Posthog world here, never leaving, numerous windows and even an Outlook forum (is that a UI we think ppl want to be in?). It's an immersive experience for sure. But I'm not sure being in a posthog:keywords world instead of the web is somewhere I want to be.
Nonetheless, take an upvote. It's a heap of nostalgic freshness. And I'd hire you for the effort crafting/building it over that guy earlier vibecoding a Win 95 UI to show off his design skills.
I had my blog before in similar way with windows etc. the only issue was search engines hated it and even if I look up exactly something written there it still won’t show up, but that was around 10y ago so maybe things changed now.
This is a very neat design; it's quite complicated, but I don't see anything particularly unnecessary. I use DPI scaling, so I was impressed because it's something I tend to have a hassle with in testing frontends which need to be aware of dimensions of objects and calculate where the user's cursor is. The "close all" button in window manager is pretty good.
This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.
I had to look at their website to find doc recently and I found that highly stupid and frustrating.
It didn't pushed me to want to use their service.
Sure, the os-like interface is really very impressive and sleek. That impressed me.
But it was awful to use when you just wanted a simple doc page.
Ar the same time, their doc sucks...
So my immediate reaction was to think that they probably spent a lot of time on developing this website instead of improving their product and it's documentation...
I'll tell you what, I was interested in this place, but this would stop me in my tracks. For an A/B testing shop to do this (which I can promise you they did not A/B test), it pretty much invalidates everything they supposedly stand for. This is one of the goofiest, most non-functional things I've ever experienced on the internet. This would be a fun hackathon project... should have stayed there.
The solution to long scrollable web pages is a website that pretends to be an OS that has lots of long scrollable web pages inside a non-scrollable webpage.
I keep debating doing something similar for a web-based BBS, in the classic BBS sense in terms of messages, files, doors/games, etc. I remember some of the thick clients like WorldGroup/Wildcat offered in later versions, and I'm mixed.
I wouldn't use it for a general website, but something more akin to an app space, I can see it kind of working.
I didn't like working with posthog when I had to because the level of analytics they do goes against my personal ethics viewpoint but I do have to say they do very good technical work. The landing page is a good reflection of the skill they have even in the product itself. Very neat landing page, and I chuckled at their "cookie banner".
I think this is cool - I won’t comment on the utility of it.
But you gotta work on the performance. My iPhone 15 Pro is practically burning my hand and I don’t even have the tab open anymore. I’ve lost 5% of battery just reading two pages on the site and iOS dimmed my screen in an attempt to cool down the device.
Looks neat, but also makes feels really slow in my browser. I'd take the regular windows at any time, especially since it's super simple to detach a tab from browser, check "Always on top", and put next to code editor or something.
Also there are non-removable bars on top and bottom of the page, even if window is "maximized".
Please fix JS dependence (load more on server side, especially at first load, since your site doesn't render anything with JS disabled), accessibility, INP, security headers and structured data, and you'll then have a perfect, optimized marketing site for tech nerds. :) Love your brand, keep up the great work!
Yet, I'm not convinced that Windows 95 is the right vibe.
But it's better than many others. There's a lot of damage done by the GUI & design 'experts' who keep up with the 'good looking things' that change routinely.
I love PostHog. The feature set, the listening to the community, the positioning and pricing, and then things like this where they're truly creative about their user interface design.
I honestly can't think of anything I don't like. I'm a very happy user.
Well, it does look a lot like Windows, macOS, and many Linux desktop environments. Yes, it might feel unfamiliar to people who have only used tablets or phones.
Things like this makes me think that controls for stuff like content density (line height, text width...), per-page dark mode, "scroll to top" and cookie banners should be a task of the web browser/user agent, not of each website.
While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.
Why can't I use my keyboard (e.g. spacebar) to scroll on you website? Apparently I have to use a mouse all the time, and that's annoying. Most OS's have accessibility options (even a lot of websites do this).
I agree with this complaint. The first thing I noticed about the page - other than the excessive and unnecessary UI - is that even when focused on the page interior text, hitting Up/Down/Space/Shift+Space/PgUp/PgDn does not scroll the interior page content at all. This is how I read most articles, and it is massively disrespectful for their website to disable the keyboard-based movement that I'm used to by default.
This reminds me of those virtual desktops/virtual “PC”s that popped up like 10-15 years ago. Which were very similar and had some basic tools for writing notes, calculator, managing files, etc. - all with web technologies.
Seems kind of redundant -- I don't need a window manager in a website. If i want to open several articles at once, can't i just open several browser windows in the window manager I'm already running?
I wonder if they already ran the A/B tests or are they still running it. If they did and this proves to be more successful than what they had before, then it changes a lot how I think about website design.
It doesn't look like an "operating system." It looks like a graphical shell. I guess those terms have become a bit interchangeable, and I'm being pedantic.
If you tap an item in the merch store on mobile there’s no indication it’s loading, and then over a second later finally loads, but at least it looks good? Ugh
First paragraph made me think, does any app declare diffent favicons based on page type (settings, projects) and status (new project, project in red alert) etc?
They made the effort, that the menu is accessible by the keyboard, but then forgot to let it trigger the hover effect, so that it is like navigating blindly.
It looks like one but it doesn't work like one, the hitbox for the right-hand window resize area completely overlaps the hitbox for the scrollbar for me.
just tried it myself,
The minimize animation went to the upper right, and I found the window again in the little icon that looks like a calendar. The same icon dances when you minimize a window, if you are looking at it. It also shows a count of the number of open windows.
I never woulda looked at that icon without observing the animation
- No accept, deny, customize, or close button in sight, and no, I am not going to switch to desktop mode or adjust my text size to something submicroscopic just to dismiss a stupid cookie banner.
Sorry guys, but that means a hard pass from me. Let the downvotes rain, but it is what it is.
software apps inc did this concept a while ago with a real vintage mac emulator and i think it was executed really well!
probably makes more sense for a company like software apps inc to do it vs posthog imo
https://software.inc/
yes I am getting tired of the "scroll documents" design. The navigation is clear and useful. I feel easy browsing all the functionalities of your website. Kudos!
One thing I feed inconvenient is how to close all windows and start from the desktop again. The dinosaur is cool!
Trying to look at the changelog and the roadmap, and what a spectacularly shitty way this was made.
A progress bar that never seems to finish loading, and restarts whenever you go back to the page, and then suddenly after navigating around and going back to the same page, I get a slow loading html table without any progress indication.
> I’ll want to refer to different pages at the same time. So I’ll CMD + click “a couple times” while browsing around and before I know it, I have 12 new tabs open
> You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
> It has window snapping, keyboard shortcuts, and a bookmark app. It works as well as you’d expect an operating system to work in a browser.
> You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.
Please stop that; you're creating the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect a second time. The fact that a web browser is an inner platform with respect to the bare-metal operating system is bad enough already.
> I have 12 new tabs open – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon.
Nothing precludes you from declaring a different favicon per page or per author. That's a site design problem, not a browser software problem.
> It has [...] keyboard shortcuts
Yet, I can't even scroll your page using my usual keys of Up/Down/Space/Shift+Space/PgUp/PgDn. That is rather disrespectful to my preferences, before you throw in all that unnecessary inner window chrome.
this is "cool" but this doesn't appeal to the enterprise customer. but it seems like they aren't targeting them and building a "good enough" suite until you have to graduate.
i miss the old web where websites were fun, so this is kind of neat. on the other hand i’m not a huge fan of sites so loaded with js that performance is abysmal.
An operating system UI solves a specific problem: presenting all of your files and applications in a GUI that's flexible enough to support a wide range of fundamental activities.
A company landing page basically has two jobs: (1) sell the product and (2) let existing users access the product.
Applying the OS UI to a company landing page applies the wrong tool to the wrong problem.
The author writes:
> You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
> You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.
My browser has tabs – I can open multiple blog posts and read them separately. I don't want to read them while playing a random novelty video game on a SaaS company website.
I commend the author of this website because it is cool and well-designed, but this is not an effective product.
The caveat to this is that the design is thought-provoking. So maybe Posthog gets some buzz and leads because of the discussion among technical people about its new website.
This website looks terrible on mobile. It shows a horizontal scroll bar any time I do a vertical scroll and there's no space for horizontal scroll in the first place. It has very large floating header and footer such that the actual content occupies little space. The footer is "ask AI" and I expected to be able to close it. When I select some text, the floating menu appears above the header and not at the place I long pressed.
While writing this comment, the website went to a screen saver state, displaying meaningless animations. I also want less white space but this website is not doing that. I honestly don't want to visit that website for a second time.
This is a pet peeve of mine - but with a phone with a small display (eg iPhone 12 mini) it feels like 1/3rd of the screen is taken up with ‘menu bars/banners’ between browser url bar/site nav bars/bottom banner i can’t dismiss about talking to an AI
This is even worse on pages like the about page where it feels like only 1/3rd of the screen is available for scrolling/reading text; it just feel totally hostile to browse.
“Please won’t someone think of the children” s/children/those of us with small hands and correspondingly small phone screens/
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
arghwhat|5 months ago
Take their right click menu for items to select whether you want an in-app tab or real browser tab. Congrats, you've broken UX by making the native browser right-click menu unavailable on link items, and because you've only implemented this on some things most of your content is not deep linkable as navigation is a cursed in-app feature.
This is as usual a fun tech demo, but it should not be used for anything in the real world.
nonethewiser|5 months ago
I found the navigation to be scattered and disorienting. In general clicking links opens new windows. In one case it navigated away from the current "page" and what I believe to be the back button (looks more like undo) didn't do anything. Why am I guessing what constitutes a page and how or if I can go back? Everyone has known how these things work in browsers for decades.
codegeek|5 months ago
If you are a no name startup, doing something like this will be a bad idea. My 2 cents.
soiltype|5 months ago
Oop, there is none.
I will never laud an application that breaks the most basic of keyboard functions. You can design a clever and flashy application with pointer-only UI, but you can't design a good one.
vasusen|5 months ago
If I were to bet, while this is fun, it will be a disaster for conversions once the launch hype goes away.
ryukoposting|5 months ago
pverheggen|5 months ago
CyberDildonics|5 months ago
the__alchemist|5 months ago
LPisGood|5 months ago
kulahan|5 months ago
ninetyninenine|5 months ago
Like this:
Frankly for a site like this efficient use of space and multi tasking isn’t as important for a front page. A front page needs to be optimized to be in your face to understand what posthog is in as little time as possible then give you optional pathways to dig in for more detail. A website that’s like an OS is too busy, it’s optimized for productivity and I still have no idea what posthog does exactly.
hliyan|5 months ago
But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large SaaS products, and also being the target audience for such websites (director or VP Eng): the speed and ease with which I can find what I want (as a potential customer) using that top navigation menu is superior to anything I've seen done so far.
I could see immediately they have 34 products under 7 categories; 5 are popular, 4 are new. If I want to try out one: Docs > Product OS > Integration > Install and configure > Install PostHog.
And if I wanted to learn a bit about their engineering: Company > Handbook > Engineering > Internal Processes > Bug prioritization.
Pricing: Pricing calculator > select product > set usage, select addons.
Each of these interactions took only seconds. And I could switch between the product overview page I opened earlier and the pricing page I just opened, without waiting for any entire website to reload (or having to right click, open in new tab, and then scroll).
As I said, there is something here beyond just aesthetics. And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile.
james_impliu|5 months ago
at the time, we were trying to figure out how to add more products in without it becoming messy, and we concluded we're trying to do a lot more than just what would work well for a 1 product company (we have very extensive content for example) - we feel quite multidimensional. thus a flatter design was proving hard to do. we wanted something that could enable us to offer a very wide variety of things (like 10+ products, handbook, job board, newsletter etc)
a lot of existing websites are trying to convey what they do in <3 seconds, and all of the internet is going for that. our company doesn't fit into 3 seconds, or if it does it's annoyingly vague "a whole bunch of devtools"...! so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do better. it will mean _some_ people bounce and that's ok, because those that stick will (sometimes!) love it.
as a project, it looked fun and we knew it'd stand out a lot as a way to justify it. it's much nicer and more cost effective for us to ship something 10/10 cool than go down the outbound-y sales route. we run at a 3 month cac payback period if you're into startup stats. the proviso is that only works if you go _really_ deep, so that your work actually stands out.
akagusu|5 months ago
The menu bar is one of the most effective and proved UI pattern. Unfortunately, on Linux we have an entire desktop environment that ditched the menu bar for hamburger menus, which are one of the most ineffective UI pattern.
maksimur|5 months ago
ironmagma|5 months ago
BrenBarn|5 months ago
The web catches up to the past again. :-) Despite all the modern attempts at simplified "delightful" interfaces, a well-structured menu bar is hard to beat.
yojo|5 months ago
Using an OS requires familiarity and cognitive effort. Tapping oversized buttons… less so.
There’s been a long trend (definitely as far back as the first iPhone release, maybe further) of every product release adding more white space, bigger elements, and overall reducing information density.
If your target is consumer web, the “don’t make me think” approach is probably still correct. But anyone who’s ever looked at a Bloomberg terminal knows there are still times when you designing for the lowest common denominator is the wrong play.
A company with a large suite of technical-ish products might be a place to experiment with alternative paradigms. That said, I poked at the site for a few minutes, then had to ask an LLM what PostHog actually does.
coliveira|5 months ago
knuckleheads|5 months ago
stavros|5 months ago
dogleash|5 months ago
Very little here that isn't explained by age-old HCI concepts on design.
>And one of the conclusions may be that our current UI/UX philosophy has inadvertantly become user-hostile
Nope. You see the "X" stands for experience. And nothing ever betrays it's own name. You're just a computer nerd that nerds too hard to get it. You've probably even used a terminal without bellyaching for the next few days. What could you know about what normies want? *cough*
ezst|5 months ago
It's almost like, "marketing", itself, as a concept, is user hostile. Most sites' purpose isn't to be efficient, or informative. It's to give the impression that they are "making a statement" (we matter because XYZ), while looking dependable and professional enough to compel calling sales for more.
Commercial transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I have all the price details I need?). Technical transparency goes against that goal (why would I call if I can tell precisely how this compares to market leaders and competitors?).
So, in many (mostly despicable) aspects, this site is terrible. Unfortunately.
nonethewiser|5 months ago
Twey|5 months ago
(Mind you on mobile I very much don't have a perfectly good window manager, and indeed can't even open multiple instances of most apps…)
cosmic_cheese|5 months ago
It also feels very foreign on macOS - Photoshop suddenly gained the MDI-type UI in like CS4 or something, after having let windows and palettes roam free on macs since Photoshop’s inception. I always turn it off, feels claustrophobic somehow.
BobbyTables2|5 months ago
Otherwise two or three such apps running at the same time becomes a game of “where’s my window”. I hate the idea of a toolbar being its own window to be managed.
badsectoracula|5 months ago
Because some applications do need multiple windows in the same application context. A common example would be image editors.
It is unfortunate that almost all generic MDI implementations (Win32 and Qt basically) are incredibly barebones. I want to have multiple windows visible when i'm using Krita, for example, but Qt's MDI support (that Krita does use) is worse than what Windows 95 had.
boredtofears|5 months ago
(That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
dotnet00|5 months ago
Barrin92|5 months ago
You answered your own question, because a lot of applications work across multiple platforms, and if you want to have control over the experience because you don't know what capacities the OS's window manager has you need to abstract it away.
ironmagma|5 months ago
dheerajvs|5 months ago
afiori|5 months ago
So if I were to split the 5 tabs I usually need for work in 3 windows I would routinely lose a bunch of them.
1718627440|5 months ago
vander_elst|5 months ago
jon-wood|5 months ago
ivanjermakov|5 months ago
nonethewiser|5 months ago
Sammi|5 months ago
keyle|5 months ago
To note, in the past, this was a big no-no because SEO was important. You had to have good SEO for search engines to index your content efficiently and show up well ranked in search results...
Now, well, that ship has sailed and sank somewhere off the west coast...
NicuCalcea|5 months ago
marci|5 months ago
I had the same issue then tried edge and it was smooth.
anal_reactor|5 months ago
spartanatreyu|5 months ago
It runs like a dream when playing with the first window. When opening a second window and dragging it around it stutters for a second then resumes back to full speed and every window after is full speed. (I'm assuming that's the browser going: "Oh wait, they really are using those functions every frame, let me spend a moment to optimize them so they're as fast as possible for future executions)
righthand|5 months ago
andrenotgiant|5 months ago
But nobody will actually use it the way they describe in this article. Nobody is going to use the site enough to learn and remember to use your site-specific window management when they need it.
binary132|5 months ago
computerdork|5 months ago
jonahx|5 months ago
Super impressive. Fun. Does a great job selling the company ethos.
But not actually that usable. I don't think this matters too much, though.
goo|5 months ago
It just needed to create a little box you can drag around when you click on nothing, like OS desktops have.
So here's the snippet to do that, toss this in the console and live the dream:
(() => { let startX, startY, box, dragging = false;
})();pimlottc|5 months ago
nonethewiser|5 months ago
scosman|5 months ago
- I'm getting about 5 FPS scrolling on a M4 Pro
- Moving a "window" around takes 29% of my CPU, and renders at about 2 fps
- I'm losing about 40% of my screen height for reading (14" laptop screen). So much so none of the article is visible above the fold, just the title and by-line.
- My browser's CMD-F finds things on layers hidden under the current window
- Changing window size via corner drag is also selecting text on other windows, no prevent default.
- Xzibit says: Tabs are bad, so we put some tabs in your tabs?
sgustard|5 months ago
Same slow spreadsheet load as sibling, but that seems like a backend issue.
nonethewiser|5 months ago
It opened a change log. It took about 5 seconds to get to 94%. Then about 20 seconds to load.
There are about 40 items.
Retr0id|5 months ago
> PostHog.com doesn't use third-party cookies, only a single in-house cookie
You're legally required to let me opt out of that cookie. Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
ttiurani|5 months ago
Even worse: because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people, they are actually fighting for the right for worse sites to spy on their visitors.
It's baffling.
elygre|5 months ago
Isn't it even simpler: Unless the cookie is used to track, you don't need the banner? For example, a cookie used to remember sort order would not require a cookie banner, I think.
(It's not about cookies. It's about tracking.)
coded_monkey|5 months ago
I’ve created websites with a cookie banner “because it’s required” even though there were no cookies involved. The idea that every website needs a cookie banner is more hurtful than the cookie banners themself.
rmunn|5 months ago
In other words, it's not actually legally required in their case, but it's practically required, because it lets everyone know that the absence of the banner is not a violation of the law.
almosthere|5 months ago
lucideer|5 months ago
jeroenhd|5 months ago
They also embed Youtube if you open the demo, which in turn tracks users (yes, even through the no-cookie subdomain: https://dustinwhisman.com/writing/youtube-nocookie-com-will-...).
Ursula von der Leyen would not be very proud.
internet_points|5 months ago
Or that this is their way of bragging that they don't use third-party cookies?
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
thecopy|5 months ago
No, this is conflating "GDPR consent" and the ePrivacy Directive. According to ePD the banner must always be shown if the company providing the service is based in the EU
oliwarner|5 months ago
pembrook|5 months ago
Where people who’ve never started a company or spoken to a lawyer about GDPR, the ePrivacy directive, the schrems rulings, etc but just emotionally love idea of what they think it represents (but actually doesn’t), debate with normal sane people.
All I can say is, I’m getting really tired of this one guys.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
temptemptemp111|5 months ago
[deleted]
voodooEntity|5 months ago
Sir : you did a fantastic job.
As someone who worked many years in web development and always was annoyed by bad UIs, this one is outstandingly good. And im not just talking about the "lookalike" itself, which is very clean and structured. Also the usability and how it "feels" to use the website is the closest to any "browser fake os" page i've ever tried (and i tried many...) - literally the only thing i was missing (and thats nitpicking on the highest level) - was when i right clicked the background that the context menu didn't have a "refresh" that i could click which sure would have no usefull effect but it would have my "using a desktop" feeling 100% round :D
So basically: great job, great website !
corywatilo|5 months ago
webprofusion|5 months ago
piceas|5 months ago
I guess they assume visitors usually arrive at the home page rather than a blog post. A quick note/link in the blog post might be helpful for those of us stumbling around.
chain030|5 months ago
"This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors."
AaronAPU|5 months ago
shakesbeard|5 months ago
No idea what they do.
baddash|5 months ago
aabhay|5 months ago
asa400|5 months ago
As someone who doesn't know posthog, this was basically impossible to navigate. The UI and theme is cool, the widgets are fun and well styled, but I couldn't actually figure out what I was supposed to be doing, what I was supposed to be reading, what meaning I was supposed to take away about a company (I'm guessing) that makes products (again - guessing).
browningstreet|5 months ago
aanet|5 months ago
For some easter eggs, click on the "Trash" icon, and click on any of the docs... Especially the "spicy.mov" :-)
Keep up the delight.
samdung|5 months ago
henrikschroder|5 months ago
Every single one of them have ultimately been massive failures, because you are re-inventing the wheel and putting a window system that you control to sidestep the window system that I control.
> I had a lot of fun in building it
Yeah, me too! But I learned my lesson.
xpe|5 months ago
palmfacehn|5 months ago
This is a cute way to build a lander. It may result in more sales because it invites the user to interact and experiment with the novel layout.
nine_k|5 months ago
The PostHog interface tries to somehow alleviate that, but still follows the Windows model a bit too faithfully. Also, bookmarking becomes... interesting.
kccqzy|5 months ago
xp84|5 months ago
euLh7SM5HDFY|5 months ago
regained. And I don't think it was a long break at all. tree organization for those side tabs, now that took a lot of time to regain, after they ripped API used by TreeStyleTabs extension.
remix2000|5 months ago
Their about me page reads:
This is literally just a verbose way to say "we're a company that does stuff"…Wouldn't it be better if the about me page actually had some concrete information inside it…?
rglover|5 months ago
cyral|5 months ago
MetaWhirledPeas|5 months ago
Even with normal web designs this is frequently my question as well. It's always a bunch of business speak about solutions and enabling. So I think that question has less to do with the website design and more to do with their choice of messaging. "We’re building every tool for product engineers to build successful products." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lpln3452|5 months ago
The modern web's obsession with maximizing engagement and time on page is fundamentally user hostile. It creates a frustrating experience for anyone viewing the web as a utility rather than just a source of entertainment.
mgaunard|5 months ago
miiiiiike|5 months ago
bigyabai|5 months ago
It's not a bad website either, the layout is really well done and it sells the branding. I just don't trust it to be accessible, as I only ever click through sites to find text content. Something about it feels like putting a Christmas tree in your bathroom for the sake of branding.
spartanatreyu|5 months ago
This, this is memorable.
hu3|5 months ago
And the theme/colours are pleasant for my eyes despite not being a dark theme.
So much so that I'll consider stealing some ideas for my next project.
Congratulations to all involved.
gibsonsmog|5 months ago
jez|5 months ago
AfterHIA|5 months ago
Godspeed you black emperors.
lordgrenville|5 months ago
jfengel|5 months ago
xpe|5 months ago
There are cases of companies providing something very close to a full OS for the focused use cases such as the Bloomberg Terminal.
But imagine if such a thing existed purely for marketing and informational purposes. "Curious about Hooli GAN Labs? Just download our Docker image to run our bespoke informational kiosk software..."
criddell|5 months ago
copypaper|5 months ago
Reminds me of Jakob's Law, "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know" [2].
But given your target audience is developers, this might actually do well.
[1] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ [2] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/
internetter|5 months ago
conversely, Berkshire Hathaway's website gives a great first impression
Klonoar|5 months ago
twalichiewicz|5 months ago
xp84|5 months ago
I remember seeing another submission from PostHog on here a while ago, I think it was about transparent pricing? Anyway, I would definitely want to use them if I was founding a startup.
ebcode|5 months ago
robinhood|5 months ago
cramsession|5 months ago
codethief|5 months ago
EDIT: Ok, I take back the "usable" part. This is insanity. I have found links that don't do anything. Some links open in overlay popups (some of which get cut off on mobile), others in new "windows". The X button behaves erratically (or at least not as I would expect), clicking on the page title in the headers sometimes opens menu, sometimes it doesn't. There's a WYSIWYG editor bar at the top of https://posthog.com/changelog/2025 even though I'm not editing anything(?!) and the "undo" button(?) looks like a browser refresh button(?!), though I'll have to admit I initially thought this might be a back button, since there's also that forward button.
Who thought this was a good idea?
urbandw311er|5 months ago
hdb2|5 months ago
kevin_thibedeau|5 months ago
jedberg|5 months ago
methyl|5 months ago
Very cool growth hack idea and I admire the fact that they were able to pull it off, as crazy as it is.
mixedbit|5 months ago
ChrisArchitect|5 months ago
Nonetheless, take an upvote. It's a heap of nostalgic freshness. And I'd hire you for the effort crafting/building it over that guy earlier vibecoding a Win 95 UI to show off his design skills.
tamimio|5 months ago
kldg|5 months ago
This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.
greatgib|5 months ago
Sure, the os-like interface is really very impressive and sleek. That impressed me. But it was awful to use when you just wanted a simple doc page.
Ar the same time, their doc sucks...
So my immediate reaction was to think that they probably spent a lot of time on developing this website instead of improving their product and it's documentation...
alberth|5 months ago
My gut is it’ll dramatically hurt. Since the call to action is way more challenging for users to find.
straydusk|5 months ago
sceptic123|5 months ago
jacknews|5 months ago
This is all the job of the window manager. We need better window managers.
paddw|5 months ago
tracker1|5 months ago
I wouldn't use it for a general website, but something more akin to an app space, I can see it kind of working.
junon|5 months ago
chatmasta|5 months ago
But you gotta work on the performance. My iPhone 15 Pro is practically burning my hand and I don’t even have the tab open anymore. I’ve lost 5% of battery just reading two pages on the site and iOS dimmed my screen in an attempt to cool down the device.
theamk|5 months ago
Also there are non-removable bars on top and bottom of the page, even if window is "maximized".
ViorelMocanu|5 months ago
DustinBrett|5 months ago
This interface is very well done, great job!
srmatto|5 months ago
procaryote|5 months ago
dirtikiti|5 months ago
so you're putting the content in a fancy container to scroll through... just to get to the bottom of that container. And then what?
i dont want an os inside a web browser inside an os.
i want to browse web [i]pages[/i].
resonious|5 months ago
coolThingsFirst|5 months ago
This is another hint that if your startup does something well the frontend barely matters.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
1dom|5 months ago
After spending a while on there, it did start to get a little sluggish with lots of windows open. A really fun desktop experience overall though.
pnathan|5 months ago
Yet, I'm not convinced that Windows 95 is the right vibe.
But it's better than many others. There's a lot of damage done by the GUI & design 'experts' who keep up with the 'good looking things' that change routinely.
davedx|5 months ago
I honestly can't think of anything I don't like. I'm a very happy user.
dewey|5 months ago
While it's a fun experiment for a personal website seems a bit impractical for a marketing page for a tool that is not always bought by engineers.
xpe|5 months ago
Razengan|5 months ago
Gualdrapo|5 months ago
jabwd|5 months ago
iiyama|5 months ago
47282847|5 months ago
talkingtab|5 months ago
ochrist|5 months ago
nayuki|5 months ago
mbirth|5 months ago
bigfishrunning|5 months ago
fny|5 months ago
Also you broke the back button.
Finally, it's not intuitive where to click to get started.
ponyous|5 months ago
kamranjon|5 months ago
Nevermark|5 months ago
Not to for serious use. But it is clever, interesting and fun to play with.
But where is the web browser? To be complete, it needs a web browser. :)
paulmooreparks|5 months ago
Awesomedonut|5 months ago
repeekad|5 months ago
aitchnyu|5 months ago
1718627440|5 months ago
egypturnash|5 months ago
tempodox|5 months ago
fusslo|5 months ago
I never woulda looked at that icon without observing the animation
acka|5 months ago
- A cookie banner fills 95% of the screen.
- No accept, deny, customize, or close button in sight, and no, I am not going to switch to desktop mode or adjust my text size to something submicroscopic just to dismiss a stupid cookie banner.
Sorry guys, but that means a hard pass from me. Let the downvotes rain, but it is what it is.
metalman|5 months ago
seemaze|5 months ago
SamDc73|5 months ago
faefox|5 months ago
cyberjunkie|5 months ago
vasuadari|5 months ago
bovinecomputer|5 months ago
albertmz|5 months ago
baddash|5 months ago
Evidlo|5 months ago
DoctorOW|5 months ago
"I'm not sure what I expected"
stalfosknight|5 months ago
nikobama|5 months ago
est|5 months ago
One thing I feed inconvenient is how to close all windows and start from the desktop again. The dinosaur is cool!
mariocesar|5 months ago
However, I really enjoy it!
phantomathkg|5 months ago
poolnoodle|5 months ago
terpimost|5 months ago
Spacemolte|5 months ago
A progress bar that never seems to finish loading, and restarts whenever you go back to the page, and then suddenly after navigating around and going back to the same page, I get a slow loading html table without any progress indication.
What a great way to really piss off users.
mannyv|5 months ago
sujesh|5 months ago
phgn|5 months ago
nayuki|5 months ago
> You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
> It has window snapping, keyboard shortcuts, and a bookmark app. It works as well as you’d expect an operating system to work in a browser.
> You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.
Please stop that; you're creating the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect a second time. The fact that a web browser is an inner platform with respect to the bare-metal operating system is bad enough already.
> I have 12 new tabs open – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon.
Nothing precludes you from declaring a different favicon per page or per author. That's a site design problem, not a browser software problem.
> It has [...] keyboard shortcuts
Yet, I can't even scroll your page using my usual keys of Up/Down/Space/Shift+Space/PgUp/PgDn. That is rather disrespectful to my preferences, before you throw in all that unnecessary inner window chrome.
jackvalentine|5 months ago
swinglock|5 months ago
joewhale|5 months ago
metalliqaz|5 months ago
65|5 months ago
Garlef|5 months ago
But the text on the sidebar moves by a few px when you hover the mouse over it.
Very annoying.
notnmeyer|5 months ago
subtlesoftware|5 months ago
A company landing page basically has two jobs: (1) sell the product and (2) let existing users access the product.
Applying the OS UI to a company landing page applies the wrong tool to the wrong problem.
The author writes:
> You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
> You can be reading the latest newsletter from Product for Engineers while watching a demo video in the corner and also playing Hedgehog Mode, the game.
My browser has tabs – I can open multiple blog posts and read them separately. I don't want to read them while playing a random novelty video game on a SaaS company website.
I commend the author of this website because it is cool and well-designed, but this is not an effective product.
The caveat to this is that the design is thought-provoking. So maybe Posthog gets some buzz and leads because of the discussion among technical people about its new website.
xkbarkar|5 months ago
Chuckles…
gedy|5 months ago
SilverElfin|5 months ago
ronsor|5 months ago
rat_on_the_run|5 months ago
While writing this comment, the website went to a screen saver state, displaying meaningless animations. I also want less white space but this website is not doing that. I honestly don't want to visit that website for a second time.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
dzonga|5 months ago
zoomastigophore|5 months ago
catlifeonmars|5 months ago
__padding|5 months ago
This is even worse on pages like the about page where it feels like only 1/3rd of the screen is available for scrolling/reading text; it just feel totally hostile to browse.
“Please won’t someone think of the children” s/children/those of us with small hands and correspondingly small phone screens/
blinger|5 months ago
tonyhart7|5 months ago