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.

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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.

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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…)

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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. Show 4 replies

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...

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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.

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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.");

})(); Show 2 replies

Usability and perf experience for me:

- 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?

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> 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.

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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 !

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It looks awesome but I clicked several bits and pieces and still have no idea what they do or what their product is. Show 6 replies

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

Show 3 replies

What is this company actually selling anyway?

Their about me page reads:

    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…?

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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.

I just click off whenever I see a site like that. Show 2 replies

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.

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.

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.

More correctly, "our website looks like a desktop environment". Show 3 replies

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/

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

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.

Who thought this was a good idea?

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. Show 1 reply

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’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.

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.

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

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!

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

This interface is very well done, great job!

There's gotta be a way to let people read multiple things at once on a webpage without resorting to this. Show 1 reply

"These website encourage scrolling, but just to get people to the bottom of the page? And then what?"

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].

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

Absolute failure of UI/UX.

This is another hint that if your startup does something well the frontend barely matters.

This made me smile to myself a fair few times - this is really great. PostHog sounds like a sincerely well intentioned and fun place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. Show 1 reply

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

Except look at it from a phone. (Developer tools if you don't have a phone).

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). Show 1 reply

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?

Very fun! Some constructive feedback: the mobile experience is painful. Lots of real estate gets eaten up, and a lot of content ends up being hidden.

Also you broke the back button.

Finally, it's not intuitive where to click to get started.

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.

Gotta love the employees feet pics folder found in the trash bin: https://posthog.com/feet-pics

I love it! Looks nice, response as smooth as butter.

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. :)

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.

I love the visuals! It's super creative and fun, more than most sites I've come across on the web!

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.

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. Show 1 reply

- 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.

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

This is almost as bad as hijacking the back button. It ruins the mental model of branching provided for by actual browser tabs.

It's funny that it shows the word "PostHog" as a "Possible spelling mistake found." in my browser ...

The overall look and feel is very BeOS and that's just about the highest compliment a piece of software can receive. :)

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

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

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/

Serious question. Could one not write a whole desktop environment in a lisp (clojurescript) and serve it as a website? Show 1 reply

Easter egg: Trash > Employee feet pics Show 1 reply

Why can't the color mode default to the system instead of defaulting to eye fryingly bright white?

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

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!

I open a few pages and then press Command+W, that close the tab :/ muscle memory.

However, I really enjoy it!

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

Better window management than macOS

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

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.

Someone is trying to redesign the web experience for humans instead of googlebot? Huzzah!

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

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

> 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.

My bank 20 years ago had an “OS like” online banking system. I remember it fondly! Show 1 reply

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

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 think that might be my favorite website. I love it, so much content.

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

Neat.

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

Very annoying.

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.

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

Chuckles…

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

Can’t I just open tabs and move them around myself?

I wish my desktop environment looked like this

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.

nothing is loading but oh well. they do have one of the best open source django apps out there though

Where is Doom?

Cute idea, but super janky on mobile.

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/

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

I think this is a terrible idea from a usability standpoint. Why reinvent windows in CSS? Desktop browsers can already open multiple pages in multiple windows. And it's all neatly integrated in my OS where I can use keyboard shortcuts to maximize, minimize, close, move windows, or place the windows on multiple monitors, etc.

It's as much a bad idea as websites trying to reinvent scrollbars. No thanks. I prefer to use my native windows and scrollbars.

I vaguely recall the posthog website in the past. I remember thinking it looked really cool. Disappointed by this change.

EDIT: Oh, I see. They just released it. It was the older version 2 days ago (September 10) https://web.archive.org/web/20250910142406/https://posthog.c...

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

arrgggh, my affordances!!!

> 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.

dream for a front end dev

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

Really cool. Great idea

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

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.

I hate the new website. I know the product well enough so know what content is on their site and yet I struggle to navigate the new design. It also really doesn’t make me want to.

It also makes me scared for the product itself, it doesn’t feel made by people who understand or care about UX.

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?)

Looks like a timeout for me, at the moment.

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

I love it for a marketing website.

It would be a hard no from me if the actual product/application was like this though.

i hope this doesn't become a trend.

A terrible idea competently executed.

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

This is satire, right?

TLDR: It looks like an operating system so it can get viral, like get an article on HN and so on.

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.

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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