Why our website looks like an operating system (posthog.com)

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'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…)

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.

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.

It's all marketing. But it's good marketing.

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.

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.

If anyone here is using PostHog: Is it just me or their service is ridiculously slow? Like the simplest queries can take a dozen seconds or so.

Also, I seem to be losing a lot of screen recording for non-bot like traffic. There “not found” message is also not clear why the recording failed.

It would have been much better if they focused on their core product instead of making all these gimmicks.

It seems a workaround. Browsers suck so let's make a browser ... hell ... a full blown OS UI inside a web page? One that is bespoke for our site.

I prefer the semantics of deep bookmarkable urls to open things in new tabs. HATEOAS! And using my OS tiling to handle things. Choosing my browser/plugins too for better tab management (maybe Arc can help here?)

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...

This works, until you want to print the page (dead tree format or PDF format) and breaks everything.

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".

It's lovely. It's unique. and UX is just delightful.

For some easter eggs, click on the "Trash" icon, and click on any of the docs... Especially the "spicy.mov" :-)

Keep up the delight.

It looks great, but now we have tabs inside windows inside tabs in windows inside displays ...

This is all the job of the window manager. We need better window managers.

My bank 20 years ago had an “OS like” online banking system. I remember it fondly!

I wish my desktop environment looked like this

Posthog you are the best but left sidebar just with icons is not great. Please expand it on hover.

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.

I'd love it if you could release this as a Gnome theme!

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.

all great while there is hype. once the initial hype fades, so will the conversion rates.

> Legally-required cookie banner

> 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.

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.

arrgggh, my affordances!!!