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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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…)

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.

Almost perfect. Inspirational.

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;

  const style = document.createElement('style');
  style.textContent = `
    .___selection-box {
      position: absolute;
      pointer-events: none;
      border: 1px dashed #2b76d6;
      background: rgba(43,118,214,0.12);
      z-index: 999999;
    }
  `;
  document.head.appendChild(style);

  function onDown(e) {
    if (e.button !== 0) return; // left click only
    startX = e.pageX;
    startY = e.pageY;
    dragging = true;

    box = document.createElement('div');
    box.className = '___selection-box';
    box.style.left = startX + 'px';
    box.style.top = startY + 'px';
    document.body.appendChild(box);

    e.preventDefault();
  }

  function onMove(e) {
    if (!dragging) return;
    const x = e.pageX, y = e.pageY;
    const left = Math.min(x, startX);
    const top = Math.min(y, startY);
    const width = Math.abs(x - startX);
    const height = Math.abs(y - startY);
    Object.assign(box.style, {
      left: left + 'px',
      top: top + 'px',
      width: width + 'px',
      height: height + 'px'
    });
  }

  function onUp(e) {
    if (!dragging) return;
    dragging = false;
    console.log('Selection rect:', box.getBoundingClientRect());
    box.remove();
    box = null;
  }

  window.addEventListener('mousedown', onDown);
  window.addEventListener('mousemove', onMove);
  window.addEventListener('mouseup', onUp);

  console.log(" Selection enabled. Drag with left mouse button. Check console for rect.");

The site is surprisingly useable on mobile.

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.

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...

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.

Im struggling to find the words but ill try:

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 !

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.

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 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.

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.

It looks awesome but I clicked several bits and pieces and still have no idea what they do or what their product is.

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.

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!

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.

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.

> I had a lot of fun in building it

Yeah, me too! But I learned my lesson.

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!

I just click off whenever I see a site like that.

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.

What a great way to really piss off users.

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.

More correctly, "our website looks like a desktop environment".

I minimized ( _ ) the window on that page, and now I can’t find it any more. I expected some obvious place where you can un-minimize a window.

Love, love, love it. You didn't need to do this but you did and it reminds me of the days when, "you needed to make things this way."

Godspeed you black emperors.

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

What’s it with the definitely not legally required “legally-required Cookie Banner“.

I'm not sure I would be brave enough to do experiments like that with my landing page. I wonder how it converts.

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.

If you leave the page idle long enough you'll even see a screensaver.

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'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.

[1] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ [2] https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law/

This looks good. Hope to see in the future, like bookmarking, etc, in the dashboard

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.

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 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...

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.

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 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.

This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating).

Or the time and money required to do this is coming out of a very large advertising bucket. In which case my gut is still not cool with it, but I don't know enough about advertising to make a judgment on if this is a waste of money.

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.

Very cool. I guess the website worked, I just bought a nice mug from their store :D

Their https://posthog.com/404 is blue screen of death :)

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.

- I open the link in a mobile browser.

- 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.

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).

As someone with a personal website which looks like an operating system, I support this trend!

This interface is very well done, great job!

I’m really curious from the marketer angle on does this help or hurt convert to sales.

My gut is it’ll dramatically hurt. Since the call to action is way more challenging for users to find.

First ( and maybe only time ) I approve of usage of cookie bannner.

Chuckles…

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.

The critique of modern websites is on point.

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.

Man if you did open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new-tab, you would get all of this "for free".

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

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".

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Serious question. Could one not write a whole desktop environment in a lisp (clojurescript) and serve it as a website?

Someone needs to make a KDE, XFCE theme of this.

This reminds me of how the web was decade(s?) ago. Reminds me of Jeffrey Zeldman's work. Love it

Yet both ctrl+click and vimium mostly work as expected. That's good.

Neat.

But the text on the sidebar moves by a few px when you hover the mouse over it.

Very annoying.

Easter egg: Trash > Employee feet pics

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.

> That’s the idea behind the new PostHog.com. You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.

No, I can't, because the way I please is to use Swish (https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/) to move windows around with trackpad gestures. Can't do that on your website.

Where is Doom?

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

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

i hope this is a gimmick and not something that'll stay long term

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.

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

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/

Cute idea, but super janky on mobile.

Looks like a timeout for me, at the moment.

So smooth, stable, easy on the head, instantly relaxing, but contains just enough pointy puns and dorky humor to function as hater repelent

I wish my desktop environment looked like this

An operating system running on an operating system to view a mockup of an operating system

Really cool. Great idea

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

must be new because few months back, it looks like every SaaS tool in existance

so immersive i actually hit ctrl+w and closed the whole tab.

this is one one of the most unique web design i have come across

arrgggh, my affordances!!!

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.

ok the https://posthog.com/sparks-joy/dictator-or-tech-bro was pretty funny :-D

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.

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?)

dream for a front end dev

The slight x overflow on the content container on mobile is maddening.

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

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.

do not do this. ever. it is NOT cool or nice in any way AND i cant scroll using keyboard arrows. meh

i hope this doesn't become a trend.

This is satire, right?

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.

When I checked, these were the top comments. Can't do anything these days ;)

- Menu is accessible but done badly, like navigating blind. - Badly implemented cookie banner (let me opt out or don't use this) - Why build an inferior multi-document interfaces (which are an anti-pattern) - Waste of money - don't devs have better things to do - Neat but runs like a dog. Give me SSG pages, otherwise make it good - Nice website but no-one will use it the way they describe - It's lovely <- followed up by: "I hate you" - Websites like this have ultimately all been massive failures - Awesome, but I have no idea what they do or what their product is - Love it - blah blah blah