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.
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.
If you are a no name startup, doing something like this will be a bad idea. My 2 cents.
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.
If I were to bet, while this is fun, it will be a disaster for conversions once the launch hype goes away.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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*
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.
(That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.");- 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?
Same slow spreadsheet load as sibling, but that seems like a backend issue.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Or that this is their way of bragging that they don't use third-party cookies?
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
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.
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 !
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."
No idea what they do.
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).
For some easter eggs, click on the "Trash" icon, and click on any of the docs... Especially the "spicy.mov" :-)
Keep up the delight.
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.
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.
The PostHog interface tries to somehow alleviate that, but still follows the Windows model a bit too faithfully. Also, bookmarking becomes... interesting.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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.
This, this is memorable.
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.
Godspeed you black emperors.
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..."
C:\>
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/
conversely, Berkshire Hathaway's website gives a great first impression
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.
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?
Very cool growth hack idea and I admire the fact that they were able to pull it off, as crazy as it is.
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.
This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.
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...
My gut is it’ll dramatically hurt. Since the call to action is way more challenging for users to find.
This is all the job of the window manager. We need better window managers.
I wouldn't use it for a general website, but something more akin to an app space, I can see it kind of working.
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.
Also there are non-removable bars on top and bottom of the page, even if window is "maximized".
This interface is very well done, great job!
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].
This is another hint that if your startup does something well the frontend barely matters.
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.
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 honestly can't think of anything I don't like. I'm a very happy user.
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.
Also you broke the back button.
Finally, it's not intuitive where to click to get started.
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. :)
I never woulda looked at that icon without observing the animation
- 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.
"I'm not sure what I expected"
One thing I feed inconvenient is how to close all windows and start from the desktop again. The dinosaur is cool!
However, I really enjoy it!
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.
> 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.
But the text on the sidebar moves by a few px when you hover the mouse over it.
Very annoying.
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.
Chuckles…
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 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/
It's as much a bad idea as websites trying to reinvent scrollbars. No thanks. I prefer to use my native windows and scrollbars.
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...
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.
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 also makes me scared for the product itself, it doesn’t feel made by people who understand or care about UX.
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 would be a hard no from me if the actual product/application was like this though.
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.
- 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