> 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.
Exactly. If they indeed only use the cookie for essential functionality, this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying.
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.
> EU law is just meritless pestering of people
It is that. It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country. And most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use, barely even work. Both the law and the way it's complied with in practice are a dumb solution to a problem that the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookies, and it would be trivial for the user to be shown a dialog when they navigate to a previously-visited site in a new session saying:
Last time you were here, the site stored information that may help them recognize you or remember your previous actions here.
< I want to be recognized > / < Forget Everything >
[ ] Also keep these third-party cookies <Details...>
[x] Remember my choice and don't ask again for ycombinator.comIf you like things the way they were before the law, just answer yes to all cookie banners you see.
It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.
Yep, it baffles me that a lot of people would rather not have the option to reject cookies. Its weird to say "I don't want to stop a website tracking me because the UX is terrible. I'd rather get tracked instead.". Of course, it would be better if the UX were even better, but I'd rather take something over nothing.
> Yep, it baffles me that a lot of people would rather not have the option to reject cookies.
Back in the day browsers offered this natively. When the advertising companies started building browsers there was a lot of incentive to see that go by the wayside of course...
But the earlier comment is saying that the law should have been more specific such as browsers needing to offer features like, say, DNT and require that website operators follow the directives instead of leaving it wide open to malicious interpretation.
I do click yes. It still wastes my time since especially on mobile they obscure at least 1/3 of the viewport. They're just like the other popups that are now on most every site: The "Sign up for our newsletter" or "Get 10% off by signing up for emails", the paywall, the "It looks like you're using an adblocker."
There's a reason people have always hated popup ads even though "just close them" has always been an option.
You should understand that the law doesn't mandate the cookie popup to be annoying. It's a deliberate choice of websites, they want you to hate the banner and the law.
That’s in theory.
In practice these banners regularly break. They are hard to click on certain devices where the button is off screen. If they use JavaScript and there is an error elsewhere, you can’t hide them. And I regularly see them over and over again on the same sites because for some reason they can’t track me effectively for this purpose.
In short they are a regular minor annoyance that does take time and effort.
How would that prevent sites from selling their users' data to third parties without consent server-side? GDPR is not about third party cookies, but about requiring informed consent.
Though I agree with your point, the idea that cookie banners in any sense contribute to "informed consent" is very debatable.
The 'selling of data' is separate of course, but the banners do nothing to actually ensure that they aren't collecting data you don't know about. They're honor system, which is dumb when you could have browsers not send that data back without opt-in.
In other words, of course Facebook knows you like bacon if you've followed 5 bacon fan pages and joined a bacon lovers group, and they could sell that fact.
But without cookies being saved long-term, Facebook wouldn't know that you are shopping for a sweater unless you did that shopping on Facebook. Today they undoubtedly do know if you are shopping for anything because cookies exist and because browsers are configured to always save cookies across sessions.
Also, I always point this out when this topic comes up: Of all websites I visit and have to click stupid banners on, almost none of them are in the market of "selling data" or building dossiers about individuals ("Steve Smith bought flowers on June 19th. Steve is 28 years old. He has a Ford Explorer. He lives in Boston."). They just want to get metrics on which of their ads worked, and maybe to know aggregate demographics about their audience. My local water utility, Atlassian, and Nintendo to pick 3 sites at random, have never been and are not in the business of data brokerage. But they do need to show cookie banners to not be sued for imaginary harms under CCPA or GDPR (unless they want to not make any use of online advertising or even aggregate analytics).
> They're honor system, which is dumb when you could have browsers not send that data back without opt-in.
Given that there is no objective way to differentiate between functional and tracking cookies, your "technical" solution would also boil down to honoring marking certain cookies as such by the website owner, effectively being the same as what we have today.
(Though I do agree that the UX would be nicer this way)
> It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country
That’s because of malicious compliance from all the websites/advertisers. I guess that is partly the lawmakers’ fault for not pre-empting that; but much larger blame lies on the industry that refuses to grant user privacy.
As an example for a site that followed the intent of the law instead: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-ou...
Github removed excess tracking so they didn’t need to show a cookie banner and that’s what GDPR’s intent was.
Blaming the industry for it doesn't change the reality that the law has done very little to improve the thing it was aimed at and made the internet worse for users (and developers) with all the banners. By any objective measure its outcomes are terrible - lawmakers should do better than just throwing out things like that.
in what way is it malicious compliance? the law just requires you ask for consent. that’s exactly what companies do. some companies violate the law by asking for consent in a way that is misleading or incorporates dark patterns. but if the law says “you must ask for consent before you do X” and companies ask for consent before they do X, that is just compliance, not malicious compliance.
As an example of true malicious compliance, some companies intentionally add trace amounts of allergens to all their food, that way they can just claim that all their food contains allergens and not be at risk of being accused of improper labeling. but the intention of the law requiring accurate labeling was clearly not to get companies to add more allergens to their food. it requires a level of creativity to even think of complying like that. It requires zero creativity to think “this law requires user consent before tracking, so let’s ask for consent”.
Man, I am always required to use this seatbelt even though I haven't had a car accident in decades, it takes me seconds to put it on and off, makes this pestering sound when I forget it, that gets into my nerves, another useless law that need nothing to improve security. /s /s
>this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying
Their name is "PostHog", a dirtbag left joke from years ago. If they were trying to make joyless scolds happy with their humor, their site would be very different.
Man it's 2025 and we still WANT to opt out of cookies visually? Why don't we just have browsers that just do that.
Seems like it should be a browser setting that controls a request header.
Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track ? Which failed in part because Microsoft turned it on by default which even further disincentivised publishers from respecting it.
The fix here would be to legally force them to comply with Do Not Track instead of forcing them to post compliant banners
No your browser can just… choose not to send cookies. The website publisher has no say in that.
There's a reason the largest advertising company in the world hasn't sanctioned this move.
Considering they have a login system, I'm going to guess that the cookie includes your login (probably in JWT form), which automatically makes it essential to site functionality. Which means the banner is there just because if it was absent, someone would say "Hey, where's the cookie banner?"
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.
> it's practically required, because it lets everyone know that the absence of the banner is not a violation of the law.
Your "logic" is baffling
What I mean is that if they don't add it, they're going to get threatening emails from regulators saying "Hey, you don't have a cookie banner". Those regulators don't have any way of knowing how their site operates, so the small banner at least manages to inform them and keep Posthog from receiving emails.
That is what I meant by "practically". I mean "in a practical sense" as opposed to in a theoretical sense.
And they can reply back: "Hey, you're wrong".
What's your source for regulators sending emails to sites not having banners for essential cookies?
For that specific question, none; I'm extrapolating from past experience, mostly not mine but other people's (who told me stories).
For regulators in general doing dumb things? Lots and lots of examples all over the place. Talk to any small-business owners you know, get them drunk, and encourage them to rant. You'll hear some stories.
Those regulators will need to study their own laws better then.
There's a general principal in regulated businesses that it's best to be above suspicion and below the radar at all times. You don't want to give regulators or opponents (such as competitors or advocacy groups) any ammunition.
This is how you minimize headaches and your legal bill. And on the day that people come after you for some unforeseeable tragedy or perhaps genuine wrongdoing (covered up by unscrupulous employees or less-than-honest vendors), you'll be better positioned to deflect legal repercussions and bad press.
The unnecessary cookie banner is a no-brainer: it costs you nothing and poses but a minimal irritant to users.
It is not in any way required, and adding it just contributes to annoyance.
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
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…)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
As a long time Gimp user, I remember dealing with the same thing but they did eventually fix that. It actually runs in a single window by default now.
I thought that on MS Windows MDI is part of the operating system. There are programs that can change it at runtime. That's honestly pretty neat.
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.
>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.
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)
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.
> i have two dozen tmux windows in half a dozen sessions locally.
> i have yet to find a window manager that lets me group so many terminals into sessions all on the same workspace.
Locally-speaking, I don't really see the point of mixing tmux sessions and tmux windows. I wonder if you mean "sessions" -> tmux windows and "windows" -> tmux panes.
What about i3/sway? You can have a tabbed container (functions like tmux windows) with split containers inside (functions like tmux panes). You can even float the tabbed container with all windows organized inside.
I just logically group tabs into the same terminal window. All OS's have hotkeys for switching between tabs and windows.
I would typically not bother with tmux unless ssh is involved.
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.)
I've fallen out of using it, but for a while I was using dtach to do similar without the virtual terminal multiplexing. Much much more direct.
I'd just run a vim session. If I needed terminals, they were in my vim! Even wrote a short shell-script to automate creating or re-attaching to a project specific vim session. https://github.com/jauntywunderkind/dtachment
Haven't looked into it, but I'm love a deeper nvim + atuin (shell history) integration.
The continuity benefit is much less than it used to be, now that we have systemd with `enable-linger` so we can make proper daemons.
that's not what tmux provides continuity for. the continuity is for interactive sessions. on my server i have more than 20 tmux windows, each one for one specific purpose. they have been running for several years.
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.
Oof...! A lot of innovation originates in engineers' "boredom".
I've been at a company that mandated innovation by having a mandatory annual innovation day, and full productivity for the rest of the year. "Be innovative for 8 hours, damn it!". That never worked. Not once. Never ever. Innovation was limited to evolution, and evolution was so slow that our customers had started implementing what we provided in house instead. Stagnation, as you call it.
I've also been at a company where people got... bored (didn't have enough to do). A guy single handedly re-wrote the firmware for a neat little hardware box that ended up saving the company an absolute ridiculous amount of money as they no longer needed to buy another much, much more expensive proprietary box.
So in my opinion having bored engineers around could very well be a sign of great success.
I disagree. I think it might even be a positive signal, especially for startups.
Imagine a startup with an engineering team that has this much creative energy, ingenuity, and vision unencumbered by bureaucratic processes, committees, and all-day meetings.
A sense of "play" is so important in creating fantastic software. Some of the best products are the result of engineers having full creative control and the liberty to "play". See, for example, Google's "20% time policy" in the early 2000s which birthed Gmail, or 3M's "permitted bootlegging" policy which birthed Post-it notes.
I'm still junior, as in I spend more time reading docs than writing code because most code I have to write is stuff I haven't written before.
IMO, first impression? This is just a straight-up better way to show docs to me. To quote the landing page: "Often times, 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 – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon."
Wow. They fixed it. First of it's kind, at least in my career so far. If you're got an example from DOS then yeah, I missed out, and agree that something important was lost along the way.
This is why we can't have nice things...
Can we just appreciate cool things please.
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...
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)
SEO was about documents. Now days everyone wants to make games. How do you rank games?
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!
If your website is about finding things, then spending more time is a bad sign.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I hate you.
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 awesome but I clicked several bits and pieces and still have no idea what they do or what their product is.
But at least you clicked
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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/
I wonder how much, if anything, Geico pays to advertise on that page.
> unless you're Berkshire Hathaway
conversely, Berkshire Hathaway's website gives a great first impression
I wonder what the ad costs and why it's there in the first place
I just click off whenever I see a site like that.
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.
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.
If you leave the page idle long enough you'll even see a screensaver.
Cute idea, but super janky on mobile.
Serious question. Could one not write a whole desktop environment in a lisp (clojurescript) and serve it as a website?
As someone with a personal website which looks like an operating system, I support this trend!
This interface is very well done, great job!
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’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.
Man if you did open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new-tab, you would get all of this "for free".
Really cool. Great idea
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".
It's all marketing. But it's good marketing.
Easter egg: Trash > Employee feet pics
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.
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.
i hope this doesn't become a trend.
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.
An operating system running on an operating system to view a mockup of an operating system
Someone needs to make a KDE, XFCE theme of this.
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.
Posthog you are the best but left sidebar just with icons is not great. Please expand it on hover.
so immersive i actually hit ctrl+w and closed the whole tab.
This works, until you want to print the page (dead tree format or PDF format) and breaks everything.
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.
My bank 20 years ago had an “OS like” online banking system. I remember it fondly!
You wouldn't happen to have any (redacted) screenshots, by chance?
[delayed]
this is one one of the most unique web design i have come across
I wish my desktop environment looked like this
all great while there is hype. once the initial hype fades, so will the conversion rates.
dream for a front end dev
arrgggh, my affordances!!!
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?)
This is satire, right?
The slight x overflow on the content container on mobile is maddening.
I'd love it if you could release this as a Gnome theme!
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 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.
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.
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.