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.
Without a doubt. Interesting idea and nice looking UI. But like you said it's creating a browser within a browser, without all the native browser support.
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.
I really admire Posthog as a company and how they run things there. Big fan. But let's be honest. This website redesign, even though cool and unique, wouldn't work if they were an unknown brand. I think they have done a great job building a solid brand over the years and now have the freedom to update their website however they want.
If you are a no name startup, doing something like this will be a bad idea. My 2 cents.
As I'm reading about their scrolling philosophy, my hand gets tired and I switch to keyboard scrolling.
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.
I used to be in-charge of homepage getting over 1.5M views a day. I would really be curious how this converts. I am assuming Posthog has a lot of metrics.
If I were to bet, while this is fun, it will be a disaster for conversions once the launch hype goes away.
The best of both worlds would be a different subdomain that serves up the same content but as a conventional site, like how old.reddit.com does it. Then you get to keep the neat gimmick, but have a fallback for users that can’t stand it.
The article is specifically saying that they know that it looks like an OS - they think that this is an improvement and it lists the reasons why. You are just calling it old and horrid without addressing any of the points made.
People have been doing this for years but it's always an experiment or a demonstration that it's possible. It's slow, it's bloated and it is the opposite of what people actually want, which is quick information.
Why don’t you read why they did that. Instead you responded with your own reasoning without countering or responding to there reasoning. I actually agree with you but the article has actual points that you didn’t bother to read or reference.
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.
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.
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 can remember a discussion with Cory (who built this with Eli, the front end eng) on the topic of "why do all websites consist of a collection of long scroll-y pages / is that appropriate for our business?" and we concluded it wasn't optimal.
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.
“as a project, it looked fun” - if that’s the rationale, I think it’s fine. The rest of it feels like a post-hoc rationalization though.
I’m not a super fan of this, and I kind of hated windows 3.x, so I might not be the target market. But I also hate many of the trends in modern website design, so maybe I’m just an old crank.
There could be a subset of this that is accessible, compatible, and doesn’t reinvent a browser in a browser. I might end up liking that better than the status quo - so I appreciate the experimental spirit!
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.
> so we thought hey we'll do something that means people _will_ explore and learn what we do bette
Meh, currently doing just that. Trying to figure out what posthog is about, try to store some keywords in my brain if I ever need to return this product in future where it fits and just try to enjoy the site :) And I'm one of the folks that try to determine in seconds/minute whether this is worth digging in or not and whether I understand the offering.
Currently I enjoy the site alot. Not sure if that is the OS thing about it or just the way that information is presented and layout.
> 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.
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.
I would be more cautious in generalizing this feeling. To me that interface feels daunting and cognitively taxing, compared to a CLI or command palette.
This only goes to show how badly designed are most websites. They're almost created like you don't have a computer, needing to resign yourself to paper-look-alike technologies with just a little bit of annoying effects that don't add anything to the experience.
I think it’s the other end of the consumer web vs power user design spectrum.
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.
This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.
Part of it is that so many sites are JS heavy in a way which brings basically nothing to the table.. it's just JS for JS' sake, and sometimes a static web site would work just as well for the user.
I think it depends. I basically see the web as two parts, "web documents" (usually called "websites") and "web apps" (usually just called apps), and it makes sense that web apps that require lots of interactivity (think drag and drop) would use lots of JavaScript, I don't people have a problem with image editors or map viewers being made more simple by the use of JS for example.
The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.
I write a lot of code myself and am usually against indiscriminate use of JS (so much so that I now recommend old fashioned server side templates over SPAs unless there is a good reason). But for this comment, I was donning my other hat: that of an executive with whom the decision to adopt (and pay for) a product usually rests. The bulk of a SaaS company's marketing budget goes to attracting and retaining the attention of such people, and ultimately getting them to pay. I feel this site does a good job of that without wasting my time.
Perhaps the amount of JavaScript used in a website is not a contributing factor into how usable a person finds it /s.
Honestly, you don't judge a back-end by how much code it's built with or what platform it's hosted on. I don't get the obsession people have with JavaScript used on websites. Websites with terrible UX often abuse JavaScript yes, but correlation != causation.
> 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.
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.
If I recall right, they have most everything in the same CMS, in particular their discussion/help forum is integrated into their main site. To me, that's what the difference is, having done similar work in the past. They have a unified and singular control over the content on their front page. It's not a dozen groups obviously jockeying for control of who gets to be higher on the page or featured more prominently, or just a portal for taking you to subdomains of each department. I don't think you can build a website like this if you don't have that CMS behind it unifying everything together, and I don't you can have a CMS like that unless you insist on it very deliberately organizationally, as the tendency in every org is towards sprawling feudal estates ruled by vp's.
Yes. That reminds me of another thing: no landing pages for each level of menu. If I go to Docs > Surveys, I can skip the overview and go directly to Features > Conditional questions. I dont' need to load an entire page with a giant banner of people smiling, and a call to action button that wants me to contact them before I have read through the functionality.
>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
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*
I don't think Don Norman would like this at all based on his rules for good web design. (someone should ask him fhough)
The top level comment is confusing marketing success with UI/UX success: it tickles their brain because they're the target audience. To everyone else this is weird and overwhelming if you're looking for something and suddenly run into it.
Might still be fun/whimsical if you're not looking for something and just stumble upon it, or get shown that
> 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.
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.
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…)
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.
That is because you are used to shitty window managers / desktop that don't remember position, do not support pinning and tagging windows, etc.
That is the issue, apps have to deal with the lowest common denominator in term of desktop management but there is absolutely no good reason to build a window manager inside a website.I think that with tabs people have generally forgotten they can open multiple browser windows.
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.
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.
> I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in?
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.
The ‘application context’ isn't a concept that adds value, at least for the applications I've seen. For things where the application windows do need to be treated differently (e.g. patch bays that can be connected together, or widgets that can be fused into larger widgets [1]) I have more sympathy for applications that want to do their own window management. But for something like the browser just grouping Web pages together, that's something entirely unrelated to the browser functionality that should be available in the window manager.
I think the issue is partly that most OS window managers really don't seem to optimize for having a dozen small windows on your screen in the way that the custom window managers in, say, art software or CAD software, often do. Mainly in terms of how much space their title bar takes/wastes.
Would you extend that argument to tabbed interfaces as well? Why should browsers support tabs (and an inconsistent interface by each vendor), when you can just open a new window instead?
The tabs reuse resources of the browser, and the browser does it really well - I think it's not even arguable that browsers are more complex than the OS GUI API, this is why e.g. Windows 11 uses react.js in start menu.
So if you create a webpage that is so damn advanced that it beats the browsers OR it somehow reuses heavy resources within one webpage, I'd say this is a good justification. And IMO the OP link isn't an example of that.
Nearly every UNIX command has its own way of formatting output, be it into columns, tables, lists, files, or TTYs (and windows, à la emacs, screen, other curses-based utils...). Even `ls` has a table formatting logic to it. This keeps the UNIX native abstraction relatively simple; everything is "just text." But the ecosystem, being quite rich, actually has a lot of divergent requirements for each utility. If that was avoidable, we probably would have seen some other abstractions appear on top of "just text," but we similarly haven't.
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)
I tend to run my tmux session for months at a time on my office workstation. When I remote in to that computer, I can type ‘tmux attach’ and all my context is there. I might have four long arc dev projects running at once, and my planning system, all within those windows.
On our datacentre servers, I also have tmux running. It is fast to connect to these hosts, attach tmux and continue from where I left off.
Another use case: it is common for corporates to require devs to use windows desktops, but to then give them a headless linux host in a datacentre for development work. Here, you use putty to connect to the linux host, fullscreen it, run tmux. On your desktop you have outlook and office and putty and a browser and no dev tools. You can do all your planning and dev work on the linux host, using your favourite ten thousand hours text editor and building your own tools, and this becomes your hub. You lose awareness that you are connected to this from a locked down windows host. Corporate security reboots your windows host for patching several nights in a row, and it does not cause you any hassle because your work context is in the tmux session on another host.
The difference is that tmux, with all its state, typically runs on a remote system. The graphical equivalent would be a VNC &c. session, assuming that the remote machine has the prerequisites for that (which is a pretty big ask).
because the OS window manager isn't superior. i have two dozen tmux windows in half a dozen sessions locally. i have shortcut keys to switch between sessions and between windows. i can do that while mixing the terminal with other gui apps. i have yet to find a window manager that lets me group so many terminals into sessions all on the same workspace.
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.)
>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.
Abstracting something away and duplicating it for yourself are two very different things! Remember Java Swing?
But I take your point, if you want to target the lowest common denominator of window managers it makes some sense to do your own window management. Mind you you could just ship both a browser and a window manager…
I wonder to what extent the pattern of applications doing their own window management masks (and therefore perpetuates) the problem of inadequate window managers.
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.
Very much this. I already have an operating system, and it's very good at managing windows, I spent quite a lot of time setting it up so that it would do so in exactly the manner I want it to.
Agreed. Closer the website to the single chunk of text, easier it is to customize for the user agent (think reader mode, dark mode, accessibility). This won't apply to every website, but this is what I expect from blogs - block of text.
- 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?
It appears as though all spreadsheets are grouped together in the same window under tabs. Perhaps its fetching the data for all of them. I noticed they all took a long time to load and then after one loaded, the others had loaded.
I imagine that could be sorted out to load per tab. Im more concerned about the idea of grouping all spreadsheets together. As opposed to a normal website which could embed a datatable in whatever page layout you want.
In general it bothers me to encapsulate what are essentially just page layouts as apps.
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...
Another FF on Android user here. Out of the many issues I've run into with this website, performance hasn't really been one of them. It's not perfect and it did lag once or twice but your average newspaper site is a lot worse.
What are you using that's causing performance issues?
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)
M4 MacBook Pro running safari, in general it's running at about 10 fps when dragging windows around. Chrome seems to perform better but I still get quite a few dropped frames. Most of those long frames are spent deep in the React internals so I'm guessing that's the cause.
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.
Idk, the UX seems really self-evident to me. Also it’s fun. I usually click away from this kind of product immediately but I stayed on this for provably 5-10 minutes just snooping around to see what it was all about.
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.
I find to be significantly less scattered and disorienting than the vast majority of "modern" websites.
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.
The article is specifically saying that they know that it looks like an OS - they think that this is an improvement and it lists the reasons why. You are just calling it old and horrid without addressing any of the points made.
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.
I have no doubt there is a subset of features here that could be implemented as a single page app.
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.
I’m not a super fan of this, and I kind of hated windows 3.x, so I might not be the target market. But I also hate many of the trends in modern website design, so maybe I’m just an old crank.
There could be a subset of this that is accessible, compatible, and doesn’t reinvent a browser in a browser. I might end up liking that better than the status quo - so I appreciate the experimental spirit!
Meh, currently doing just that. Trying to figure out what posthog is about, try to store some keywords in my brain if I ever need to return this product in future where it fits and just try to enjoy the site :) And I'm one of the folks that try to determine in seconds/minute whether this is worth digging in or not and whether I understand the offering.
Currently I enjoy the site alot. Not sure if that is the OS thing about it or just the way that information is presented and layout.
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.
If anybody could do it, I expects its Posthog.
Dead Comment
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.
The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.
Honestly, you don't judge a back-end by how much code it's built with or what platform it's hosted on. I don't get the obsession people have with JavaScript used on websites. Websites with terrible UX often abuse JavaScript yes, but correlation != causation.
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.
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*
The top level comment is confusing marketing success with UI/UX success: it tickles their brain because they're the target audience. To everyone else this is weird and overwhelming if you're looking for something and suddenly run into it.
Might still be fun/whimsical if you're not looking for something and just stumble upon it, or get shown that
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…)
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.
That is the issue, apps have to deal with the lowest common denominator in term of desktop management but there is absolutely no good reason to build a window manager inside a website.I think that with tabs people have generally forgotten they can open multiple browser windows.
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.
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.
[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Eros
So if you create a webpage that is so damn advanced that it beats the browsers OR it somehow reuses heavy resources within one webpage, I'd say this is a good justification. And IMO the OP link isn't an example of that.
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.
(That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
On our datacentre servers, I also have tmux running. It is fast to connect to these hosts, attach tmux and continue from where I left off.
Another use case: it is common for corporates to require devs to use windows desktops, but to then give them a headless linux host in a datacentre for development work. Here, you use putty to connect to the linux host, fullscreen it, run tmux. On your desktop you have outlook and office and putty and a browser and no dev tools. You can do all your planning and dev work on the linux host, using your favourite ten thousand hours text editor and building your own tools, and this becomes your hub. You lose awareness that you are connected to this from a locked down windows host. Corporate security reboots your windows host for patching several nights in a row, and it does not cause you any hassle because your work context is in the tmux session on another host.
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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.
But I take your point, if you want to target the lowest common denominator of window managers it makes some sense to do your own window management. Mind you you could just ship both a browser and a window manager…
I wonder to what extent the pattern of applications doing their own window management masks (and therefore perpetuates) the problem of inadequate window managers.
- 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 appears as though all spreadsheets are grouped together in the same window under tabs. Perhaps its fetching the data for all of them. I noticed they all took a long time to load and then after one loaded, the others had loaded.
I imagine that could be sorted out to load per tab. Im more concerned about the idea of grouping all spreadsheets together. As opposed to a normal website which could embed a datatable in whatever page layout you want.
In general it bothers me to encapsulate what are essentially just page layouts as apps.
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.
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...
- some posthog dev waking up this morning after yesterday's release
I had the same issue then tried edge and it was smooth.
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)
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;
})();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.