> 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.
alberth · 2m ago
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.
Twey · 2h ago
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…)
BobbyTables2 · 8m ago
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.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
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.
Twey · 1h ago
I think that's still a little too restrictive. Sometimes you really do want multiple groups of windows that may belong to the same (think multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs) or different applications (e.g. grouped by task). It's not hard to see how the application marketplace leads to every app doing everything including managing all the things it does, but it's not good for the user.
cosmic_cheese · 24m ago
Custom groupings is a nice feature too, but that feature can live happily alongside app groups. In fact I think the two would compliment each other nicely.
Barrin92 · 59m ago
>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.
boredtofears · 1h ago
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)
kurisufag · 1h ago
tmux (and screen) are incredible assets for remote sessions, both for continuity across dropped shells and multi-shell activities when the connection process is tedious (multiple jumphosts, proxies, etc.)
keyle · 1h ago
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...
righthand · 34m ago
SEO was about documents. Now days everyone wants to make games. How do you rank games?
keyle · 33m ago
I think it's about user retention. If people have fun on your website, they'll stick around and they might even read some text!
andrenotgiant · 2h ago
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.
jonahx · 1h ago
This was my reaction.
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.
miiiiiike · 16m ago
I just click off whenever I see a site like that.
copypaper · 16m ago
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.
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.
nine_k · 25m ago
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.
mbirth · 44m ago
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.
jez · 1h ago
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.
theamk · 1h ago
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".
cramsession · 2h ago
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.
paddw · 2h ago
It's all marketing. But it's good marketing.
terpimost · 57m ago
Posthog you are the best but left sidebar just with icons is not great. Please expand it on hover.
Gualdrapo · 1h ago
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.
blinger · 29m ago
all great while there is hype. once the initial hype fades, so will the conversion rates.
lantry · 25m ago
arrgggh, my affordances!!!
jackvalentine · 1h ago
My bank 20 years ago had an “OS like” online banking system. I remember it fondly!
ronsor · 1h ago
You wouldn't happen to have any (redacted) screenshots, by chance?
phantomathkg · 1h ago
This works, until you want to print the page (dead tree format or PDF format) and breaks everything.
egypturnash · 2h ago
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.
ronsor · 1h ago
I wish my desktop environment looked like this
gedy · 45m ago
I'd love it if you could release this as a Gnome theme!
tamimio · 46m ago
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.
ChrisArchitect · 49m ago
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.
giveita · 1h ago
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?)
jacknews · 1h ago
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.
csomar · 1h ago
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.
> 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.
My gut is it’ll dramatically hurt. Since the call to action is way more challenging for users to find.
(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…)
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.
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.
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.
(That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
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...
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.
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.
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/
For some easter eggs, click on the "Trash" icon, and click on any of the docs... Especially the "spicy.mov" :-)
Keep up the delight.
The PostHog interface tries to somehow alleviate that, but still follows the Windows model a bit too faithfully. Also, bookmarking becomes... interesting.
Also there are non-removable bars on top and bottom of the page, even if window is "maximized".
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 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?)
This is all the job of the window manager. We need better window managers.
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.