Why our website looks like an operating system

Posted by bnc319 9/11/2025

Why our website looks like an operating system(posthog.com)

684 points | 487 commentspage 2

webprofusion 9/12/2025|

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

piceas 9/12/2025||

Yeah. I found pictures of feet before I found their products.

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.

Kwpolska 9/12/2025||

I went to their main page and I still don’t know what they’re really doing. "We’re building every tool for product engineers to build successful products." is an entirely meaningless sentence.

chain030 9/12/2025|||

Haha I love that. I literally wrote this post...

"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."

AaronAPU 9/12/2025|||

Yeah I liked the aesthetic but left the site having no idea what I was even looking at or why I would care.

shakesbeard 9/12/2025|||

Same. Clicked around. Was annoyed that a single click on an icon opened the window and not a double click. Used the navigation a bit and left.

No idea what they do.

baddash 9/12/2025|||

That's how most company websites are XD

aabhay 9/12/2025||

But at least you clicked

asa400 9/12/2025||

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).

browningstreet 9/12/2025|

Once I hit the fake, non-functional scrollbars I tapped out. I'm not gonna decode what's fake and what's real in a webpage UI.

aanet 9/12/2025||

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.

samdung 9/12/2025|

I hate you.

xpe 9/12/2025||

If one witnesses the spiciness first-hand, one will understand the comment above is fitting and appropriate.

henrikschroder 9/12/2025||

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.

xpe 9/12/2025|

Reminds me of some often-repeated suggestions that take the form of "every developer should build their own X" where X might be: blog, ORM, key-value store, database, OS, distributed computation framework, neural network, decentralized currency. But the one that you really have to be afraid of, in terms of time-spent followed by a new life-long obsession is "your own keyboard".

palmfacehn 9/12/2025||

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.

nine_k 9/12/2025||

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.

kccqzy 9/12/2025||

This is because people are so used to tabs that they forgot they can open new browser windows. For a long time I configured my browser not to use tabs, because most of the time when I open two or more pages I want to see them simultaneously.

nine_k 9/12/2025||

Yes, this is sort of weird, but understandable. The thought of separating contexts this way for some reason takes a bit of conscious effort.

I have 7-8 Firefox windows across 3 virtual desktops, all named using the Window Titler extension [1]. Every name starts with an emoji to make it easy to tell them apart just by color.

Truth be told, many windows may be confusing to navigate via alt-tab-like interface; I additionally run rofi [2] for quick switching by name / title.

[1]: https://github.com/tpamula/webextension-window-titler

[2]: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

xp84 9/12/2025|||

Edge has had side tabs (aka Vertical Tabs) for years now. I don't personally see a single reason to use Chrome over Edge. And I spend most of my time in MacOS.

rglynn 9/12/2025||

I doubt many on HN actually use Chrome. Instead preferring Firefox or one of the many Chromium browsers (Brave, Arc etc).

I agree that there isn't a reason to use Chrome when Chromium exists, although which Chromium flavour and whether to use a different engine entirely, is the question.

euLh7SM5HDFY 9/12/2025||

> Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side

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.

nine_k 9/12/2025||

If they indeed adopted Tree Style Tab, that is, allowed tabs to form a tree, that would be wonderful. Alas, I sill have to run TST and hide native tabs.

remix2000 9/12/2025||

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…?

rglover 9/12/2025||

They sell error tracking, log observation, etc. Basic devops tools. Think similar to Sentry or LogRocket.

cyral 9/12/2025|||

The homepage has a list of what they are selling right under the header text

MetaWhirledPeas 9/12/2025||

> What is this company actually selling anyway?

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)_/¯

lpln3452 9/13/2025||

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.

mgaunard 9/12/2025||

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.

miiiiiike 9/12/2025|

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

bigyabai 9/12/2025||

Sadly, me too. We must share the fun-hating gene, or somesuch.

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.

spartanatreyu 9/12/2025||

Ok, but if they have a bog-standard site like everyone else then they're not going to look any different than everyone else, which would cause users to leave.

This, this is memorable.

leftnode 9/12/2025|||

I think the opposite is true. Sure, it's technically impressive, but users have been trained for decades at this point to understand how a basic marketing page should look and this isn't it. These kinds of sites are best left as portfolio pages for designers to show off their skills, not for B2B SaaS landing pages.

miiiiiike 9/12/2025|||

It stopped being memorable when it became a trend. I see 1-2 portfolio sites like this every week.

It’s slow. It’s janky. It’s buggy (random x/y overflow issues on mobile, reader view came up blank a few times.) It takes an enormous effort to maintain and update. Too clever.

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