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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.
There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.
The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…
More like they can see it but also can't see it. There's megabytes of JS loaded just to show me a crappy glorified PDF that doesn't even work properly. A page I could have literally made using only HTML and CSS and it would be better, but somehow you've made it take 11mb of JavaScript code and it doesn't even work properly. That's the kind of website I scoff at.
I have no issues at all with this website. It's awesome. I mean it's a bit slow but that's probably because it's on the front page on HN right now - yet it still works pretty well. The design is delightful. Incredibly well done. One of the coolest websites I've seen. Who cares how much JS it takes, it's obviously worth it.
> 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.
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.
>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*
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.
if, by way of totally random example, each feature team within each department measures how much revenue and how many customers come because of a specific feature that team is working on and responsibly, and that feature team's pm is compensated based on these metrics, then naturally each team will want to bloat the landing space on the front page areas as much as possible. very hard to make something that presents as cohesively as this when incentives of those involved are in competition with one another.
> 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.
- 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, yeah, it doesn't fit all applications and web browsers are a case where MDI doesn't really work. The linked site is more of a gimmick, at least as far as the documents go.
But my response was about calling MDI an anti-pattern in general. Just because it doesn't fit all cases, it doesn't mean it is an anti-pattern.
Oh no I get that the in-site MDI is a funny stylistic choice, and I've no problem with it. But the thing it's poking fun at is in-browser MDI, hence the comment.
I stand by the anti-pattern comment. I think there are very, very few cases where ‘MDI’ is appropriate, and I put it in quotes because the things being managed in that case are almost never ‘documents’ in any meaningful sense (rather they're some kind of graph node). Functionality apps build with MDI is basically always independent of the actual app and would be better implemented in the window manager — and more often than not there's actually no additional functionality over even the lowest common denominator of window managers.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 don't really see the point of mixing tmux sessions and tmux windows.
sessions let you group windows. i have a group/session for each project/purpose. one session is for all remote connections. one for my personal stuff, diary, etc. one for my hobby. one for personal dev projects, one for client work.
sessions also means that i can connect to tmux from multiple terminal windows. i generally have two windows, one for dev work and one for everything else.
generally i feel that having more than half a dozen windows in a session makes the session unwieldy, harder to navigate, because it becomes more difficult to find the window i am looking for.
which would be the same problem if each was a gui window. try to find your way around 20 gui windows.
sure that works, but then you are also using terminal functionality and not the window manager, which still shows the window manager as lacking in features, which was the argument i was responding to.
seriously, a window manager that can group windows and manage those groups would be awesome. workspaces help, but they are often just there, and can't be managed, reordered, named, etc..
actually, i think kde may have some of that functionality.
i still prefer tmux in any case because it is more scriptable, and it provides a detach function. although i recently started exploring wezterm, which can be configured to work like tmux and also has a way to detach and reattach sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
> 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 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.com
The EU law is fine, the implementation used isn't. But never blame the EU laws for cookie banners; the law does not mandate banners at all, let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway. That's all the industry.
The industry could have come up with a standard, a browser add-on, respect a browser setting, etc but they chose the most annoying one to pester you, the user.
> let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway.
In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that. Of course tech companies have a loosy-goosy relationship with the law at the best of times.
Yeah, and only when (I think) Google got a hefty fine did the banner implementations start to add an instant "opt-out" button. The tech companies really try to skirt the rules as closely as possible.
I'm glad I'm not in EU legal, it's gotta be like dealing with internet trolls ("I didn't ACTUALLY break any rules because your rules don't say I can't use the word "fhtagn"")
I feel like the #1 problem with the cookie law is that the vast majority of websites need to do something in order to comply while keeping their business model and the law hasn't provided a clear direction for how to comply with it.
If they had done that, nobody would be making cookie banners wrong.
> In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that.
Yes. For "cookie banners" the law in fact forbids hiding "Reject all non-essential and continue" to be given less visual weight than "Accept all and continue", let alone hiding it behind "More details" or other additional steps.
It also requires consent to be informed (i.e. you need to know what you're agreeing to) and specific (i.e. you can't give blanket consent, the actual categories of data and purposes of collection need to be spelled out) and easily revokable (which is almost never the case - most sites provide no direct access to review your options later once you've "opted in").
One good example I can think of for a "cookie banner" that gets this right is the WordPress plugin from DevOwl: https://devowl.io/wordpress-real-cookie-banner/ (this is not an ad, but this is the one I've been recommending to people after having tried several of them) because it actually adds links to the footer that let you review and change your consent afterwards.
EDIT: Sorry, I first misread "disallows" as "allows". I've amended my reply accordingly.
Kind of. The intent is good and the wording disallows some of the dark patterns. The challenge is that it stands square in the path of the adtech surveillance behemoths. That we ended up with the cesspit of cookie banners is a result of (almost) immovable object meeting (almost) irresistable force. There was simply no way that Google, Facebook et al were ever going to comply with the intent of the law: it's their business not to.
The only way we might have got a better outcome was for the EU to quickly respond and say "nope, cookie banners aren't compliant with the law". That would have been incredibly difficult to do in practice. You can bet your Bay Area mortgage that Big Tech will have had legions of smart lawyers pouring over how to comply with the letter whilst completely ignoring the intent.
Yes, this sounds good. This sounds like something desirable. I mean, this is the expectation literally everywhere else so... why not the web?
Also, data collection is fully a choice. You can always choose not to. I've built websites with logins and everything and guess what - no cookie banners necessary. Just don't collect data you don't need.
> GDPR requires informed consent before collecting data.
And this is a good thing, no? I certainly think so.
> It's a wonder we don't have to force everyone through an interstitial consent page.
If the information being tracked is truly essential to the site/app (session management and authorisation data for instance) then no consent is needed, for anything else ask before you store it, and most certainly ask before you share it with your “partners” or anyone else.
Many websites are free because they survive from ads. Ads make more money if you collect data. The EU law essentially cut the revenue of all these websites. Their choice is to not collect data (meaning less revenue) or show a popup (meaning more bounce rate, which means less revenue).
People who think this is a good thing are being short-sighted. That's because this law mainly affects websites that host information that visitors visit from clicking on links on the web. If a website is like Facebook or Youtube, where users must sign up first or probably already have an account, they will be able to collect data for ads with or without banners since they have their own ToS for creating an account, and they can infer a lot from how the user uses their services.
I'm not saying privacy regulation is a bad thing. It made countless businesses reconsider how they handle people's data. But it's clear to me that there are two problems.
First, this regulation hurts all the small websites that need to exist in order for we have to have a healthy "web." A lot of these are making only barely their hosting costs in ads, so there is no way they can afford the counsel to figure out how to comply with laws from another continent. If we had another way to support these websites, this wouldn't be a problem, but ads are really the lifeblood of half of the internet, and almost nobody wants to donate or pay a subscription.
Second, this regulation doesn't even really protect people's private data in the end, which may give users a false sense of security because they have the GDPR on their side. I forgot the name, but there was a recent gossiping app that required the user to upload a photo in order to sign up, which should be deleted afterwards, but they never deleted it and when the app was hacked the attacker had access to photos of all users. It's the same thing with GDPR. We can tell when a website is clearly not complying with the GDPR, but there is no way to tell if they actually complied with the GDPR until the server gets hacked.
Even the way they comply with GDPR isn't enough to protect users' privacy, e.g. if you have an account on Discord and you want your data deleted, they will simply turn every post your made into an "anonymous" post. This means if you sent a message that discloses your private information on Discord, that will never get deleted because its outside the scope of compliance. You could literally say "Hi, my name is XYZ, I live in ABC" and they won't delete that because you consented to provide that information, they will just change your username from "xyz" to "anonymous" or something like that.
I still wonder what are the actual benefits of GDPR with these cookie banners when 99% of the users just stay on Facebook and Youtube anyway.
> Many websites are free because they survive from ads. Ads make more money if you collect data.
My business is to get money out of other people's wallets and bank accounts. I could get make much money if you just logged into your bank account and approved transactions whenever I told you to, or screamed less whenever I took the wallet out of your pocket on my own.
That there's a way to earn more money does not justify it as legitimate thing to do, and if you can't figure out how to run a service in legitimate ways does not mean that illegitimate ways that attempt to violate its users in secret suddenly become okay.
I read an interview with a bunch of different young people. They all basically said "I just click 'yes' or 'accept' automatically". It sounded like they all believed that this was something they had to do in order to get to the content.
Bad implementation of the EU law indeed, as another comment said. It fails the purpose completely and just create more problems for nearly everyone.
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 isn't saying that you shouldn't have options, rather that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators to provide a unified solution that is agreeable to users instead of leaving it completely wide open to malicious compliance.
These kind of laws need to be careful to not stifle true innovation, so it is understandable why it wanted to remain wide open at the onset. But, now that we're in the thick of it, maybe there is a point where we can agree that popup dialogs that are purposefully designed to be annoying are in volition of the spirit and that the law should be amended to force a better solution?
> that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators
1. The law isn't about browsers or websites. It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
2. The world's largest advertising company could do all you describe. And they do work with websites. First by repackaging tracking through FLoC. Then by just simply repackaging tracking and calling it privacy: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923
> It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
Obviously. And where there are problems in those domains equal specificity would be asked for. But since we're talking about in the context of browsers specifically...
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.
Seems like it's working then? Because the website chose to (optionally) track you, you need to go through a minor annoyance to accept it. You're effectively making a choice that you're fine with this annoyance (since you keep using the website) and since you're accepting it, you're fine with being tracked.
Other people already get two choices to make here which they didn't get before, which is a win in my book. Seeing the banner, you can decide to avoid the website and if you still wanna use the website, you can chose if you allow them to track you by PII or not.
I get the choice, but I make the choice I like less because it is more convenient to make it. If we only look at the positives, then the situation is better. But we have to look at the cost, and there is a cost, in terms of time and mental effort, to read the banner, figure out what the choices are, and if I am not accepting all cookies, how to go through the process of rejecting some of them. Sometimes it's very involved.
Also, I am an educated consumer and understand what a cookie is. Most people do not and do whatever is necessary to make the consent screen go away. Because of that, effectively they don't get this choice.
As one of the parent posts said, if it was implemented on the browser level, I would get the choice, and the cost of making the right choice would be smaller. If the defaults were to "reject unnecessary cookies" then most of the population would get the benefit.
The way it is right now feels like a net negative. Most people don't know what the consent is about and will not spend the time to learn it. Companies still find ways to track you that agrees with the letter but not the spirit of the law. I have friction whenever visiting a new website (or an old one that forgot my choice). The only winners are people who don't value their time and are smart enough to understand cookie consent. That's a small percentage of the general population.
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.
Well, it works, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the website owners doing it, since in practice the frustration lands on the EU lawmakers. That just makes the law bad: it doesn’t really prevent anything, and it leaves people a little more anti-EU.
Under German law, the BGB (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligations or explicitly waive ones prescribed by the BGB (and some in fact can't be waived or not entirely) - if you can prove an agreement was made that falls under the BGB's laws, those laws apply to it regardless of the existence of a written and signed contract. And yet it's extremely uncommon not to have a written contract for serious business relations and most contracts explicitly insist on signatures (in fact in German contract law, the legal phrase "in Schriftform", literally "in writing", is defined in such a way it specifically requires a document signed by both parties whereas for "in Textform", literally "in text", even an e-mail or text message would be sufficient).
It's not cookie banners that are wasting productivity, it's mutual distrust and the need to protect against it. "Cookie banners" (or more correctly: consent forms) are legal contracts. The reason they are often so annoying to navigate is that the companies that built them want to try to trick you into agreeing to things you have no interest in agreeing to or might even have an interest in not agreeing to. Technically the law forbids this but it's still more profitable to risk the fine than to abide by the law.
Or to put it another way: there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. The consent form isn't for reading the article, it's for what the site wants to do to you (or your data - which includes all data collected about you because the GDPR defines that as being yours, too) while you're reading the article.
The GDPR doesn't make you waste time on cookie banners. The GDPR grants you ownership of all personally identifiable information of you and about you - it creates legal rights and protections you previously didn't have. Cookie banners exist because companies want to infringe upon those rights. Most cookie banners are difficult to navigate because most companies don't want you to understand what you're agreeing to (and on second order because they want you to blame the law granting you rights rather than them for infringing upon those rights).
You also can't have capitalism without bureaucracy. There's no such thing as stateless capitalism because states allow for capital to exist. Without states, you'd have to justify your claims to your peers and anything in excess of what you can justify for personal needs would be considered hoarding and wasteful. And in order to have a state, you need bureaucracy to structure the operation of that state for it to act as a cohesive entity.
Rights don't make sense without bureaucracy because they only have meaning when you deal with them at that layer of abstraction. You can't respect and infringe "rights" interpersonally. You can act ethically or unethically, you can be nice or a bit of a dick, you can harm or help. But rights only become necessary as a concept when you have processes that need to interact with them and abstract entities that uphold and enforce them. Rights allow you to sue or call the police. But without rights you can't have capitalism. States enforce property rights literally at the end of a gun (and this includes "state property" too in case you were wondering about so-called "communist" states).
Dude, I was in France and browsed to a page and it was a full page cookie modal with like 3 buttons and all these sliders. Turns out everywhere in the EU has these insane page things.
The entire point of the law was to make websites using extraneous cookies and trackcing annoying to use. It's not something that can be solved in the browser _at all_. What I guess no one expected is that most websites would just decide to go on and pester their users rather than stop the tracking -- and that users would still continue using those websites.
I don't agree. It is the main way I am being informed that some sites I attempt to use, share my data with thousands of external partners, for no relevant function. I do not believe this information would be divulged to me and the public, if voluntary.
The public is mistreated in innumerable ways, starting by not letting them know it is happening.
> the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookies
This is only an option if you limit tracking to using cookies. But neither tracking technologies, nor the current EU law, are limited to tracking via cookies. It also kills functionality for many web applications without also accepting all tracking. Some browser-flavors went to extreme lengths to prevent tracking through other means (eg fixed window size, highly generic header settings, ...).
Maybe I am mistaken, but it seriously frustrates me how much people within the relevant field make this mistake of conflating tracking and cookies and come to this "it would be so simple" solution.
A welcome update to the law would be to allow a header flag to opt out/in (or force the do-not-track header to have this functionality) preventing the banner from showing.
The pessimist in me thinks a legally enforced header and corresponding browser setting (so that the user wouldn't have to make an explicit choice per website) would have met enough pushback from businesses for the EU to back down to something with the infinite stupidity of the current solution.
Maybe we could move towards that end in small steps. The EU should start by banning irrelevant non-sequiturs like "We value your privacy" and other misleading or at best distracting language. It can then abandon the notion that users are at all interested in fine-grained choice, and enforce that consent and non-consent to non-essential statekeeping are two clearly distinguished and immediately accessible buttons. No one wants to partially block tracking.
It seems as though the EU is operating under the notion that this is all a matter of consumer choice, as though any informed consumer would choose to have tabs kept on them by 50 trackers if not for the inconvenience of figuring out which button stops them.
No, it is not that. It highlighted an issue, and it makes it painfully obvious when a particular page is being extra ignorant about your privacy and trying to sell it to thousand vendors instead of a handful.
What I don't like about cookie popups isn't the popup (which isn't something the EU law dictated btw), it's that someone thought it was okay to have hundreds of advertisement vendors and data brokers on a single news article, and it's better to know so I can just close the tab and never interact with that webpage again if they're being excessive asshats.
They have failed at enforcing this properly though, in particular with the recent proliferation of "legitimate interest" abuse (it is only legitimate interest if it an implied component to a service I am directly requesting), and the general issue of popups illegally making rejection different from acceptance, intentionally making rejection slow, or even requiring payment to continue without cookies. And yes, the occasionally completely defective prompt.
I do agree that it would be neater if the browser handled this though. Would also be neater if the internet wasn't entirely sponsored by privacy violations. :/
> 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.
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.
Very little? The norm used be to slap google analytics on everything. Suddenly everybody thinks about compliance — especially those who didn't even have idea there was something wrong.
Many sites ditched tracking altogether so they don't have to have banners. Everybody is aware of GDPR so you can be pretty confident that when european site has no banner it doesn't track you.
Could the law be better? Sure I would love to ban tracking altogether. But this was lobbied to hell by AD companies. Everybody was kicking and screaming because they want all the data. And we still got something that helps. That is a win.
And you can see how industry hates it in way they implement the banners. It is annoying and confusing on purpose. You could comply in nice way but when you need to share the data with your 141 ad partners and each one gets their own checkbox… good luck.
Same reason nobody was respecting the dont track me flag. The industry is absolutely and exclusively to blame here.
Law was created as response to advertisers invading privacy, are you arguing that unchecked invasion of your privacy is worth it? If anything unchecked invasion of privacy wasted all of those hours plus hours of work of lawmakers plus hours of work while implementing all that advertising in the first place…
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”.
Have you seen the 300 individual checkboxes you need to disable? Or the hoops that the advertising industry went through to claim that “Do-Not-Track” didn’t count for:
> In the context of the use of information society services, and notwithstanding Directive 2002/58/EC, the data subject may exercise his or her right to object by automated means using technical specifications.
The malicious compliance is more that they all refused to add the one-click opt-out until a high-profile enforcement against Google brought them to heel.
The "malicious" compliance came from the trick that accepting / opting-in was fast and almost instant, but rejecting / opting-out was a slow and arduous process, and it required lawsuits and fines [0] for companies to comply.
I found a website that lists all fines handed out for violating the GDPR: [1]
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.
It’s because those were made to be bad solution by very advertising companies wanting people to be denied their rights and making it look like law is bad instead of implementation being bad
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)
Well, I mean, we could go the route Safari has, and just blanket-disable 3rd party cookies by default. It's... quite effective (if a tad annoying for folks implementing single-sign-on)
I don't know, I don't think it helps all that much when you are up against Facebook's, and Google's wits on how to circumvent it.
If they can open a port and side-step the security system of Android wholesale, they can probably find a "solution" to the not even that hard of a problem of doing tracking server-side.
There is a problem in convincing everyone on the internet to install a server-side tracking component.
Pretty much everyone was willing to give this away for free on the client side, in return for limited social integration, or (in Google's case) free analytics - server side is a significantly harder sell in many companies, and there is a much richer variety of backend languages/frameworks you have to integrate with.
lol this is what it used to be like back in the day. We have forgotten the old ways and now we yearn for them. Every tutorial instructed old people to just click Always Allow or else they would not be able to read their webmail.
The law is fine. The industry has just decided that dragging its heels and risking fines is better than actual compliance.
Most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use aren't compliant.
EU law requires "Accept All" and "Reject All Non-Essential" be both equally easy to access and given equal weight (or rather: the latter can't be given less weight and made more difficult to access, which almost all of these scripts blatantly ignore).
Browser vendors can't solve this because the question isn't technical but legal. It's not about first-party vs third-party cookies (let alone same-origin vs cross-origin) but about the purposes of those cookies - and not just cookies but all transferred data (including all HTTP requests).
You don't need to (and in fact can't) opt into technically necessary cookies like session cookies for a login and such. It's plausible that these might even be cross-origin (as long as the other domain is controlled by the same legal entity). If they're provided by a third party, that would indeed be data sharing that warrants a disclosure and opt in (or rather: this can only happen once the user acknowledges this but they have no option to refuse and still use the service if it can't plausibly be provided without this).
The GDPR and ePrivacy laws (and the DMA and DSA) have done a lot for privacy but most of what they have done has happened behind the scenes (as intended) by changing how companies operate. The "cookie management" is just the user-facing part of those companies' hostile and dishonest reactions to these laws as well as a cottage industry of grifters providing "compliance" solutions for companies that can't afford the technical and legal expertise to understand what they actually need to do and think they can just tick a box by buying the right product/service.
Heck, most companies don't even provide legally compliant privacy policies and refuse to properly handly data access requests. The GDPR requires companies to disclose all third parties (or their categories if they can't disclose identities) your (specifically your) data has been shared with and the specific types of data, purposes of that sharing and legal basis for sharing it (i.e. if it required consent, how and when that consent was given) - and yet most will only link you to their generic privacy policy that answers none of those questions or only provides vague general answers or irrelevant details ("We and our 11708 partners deeply care about your privacy").
> because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people
The law should have been just a browser setting sites had to follow, making it a "banner" has made it meritless pestering while pretending it's for my own good and allowing the worst offenders to make convoluted UI to try and trick you every site visit.
If the EU was a serious entity, they would just forbid cookies that are non-essential. Simple as that. Either you take your responsibility as a law maker serious, or you refrain from making laws entirely.
People ranting against cookie banners and GDPR literally never read the regulation itself and they literally never read what these banners are supposed to trick you into
> makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people
Which it is?
I am from the EU and I don't see what this law has accomplished apart from making the WWW worse, especially on mobile.
I remember back when Opera was a paid browser, last century, it already have options to accept all cookies, refuse them, or set fine-grained preferences per website. No need for handling it at the website level if the client can do it.
You can argue that the law might not have improved things (at least not as much as intended), but nothing about this law has made the WWW worse. If you believe that, you've fallen for the concerted efforts of the advertising industry spreading misinformation about who's idea the annoying consent popups were & (like this website) perpetuating the myth that they're a legal requirement.
None of the new annoyances on the modern web that you're thinking about are mandated by EU law. It benefits the ad industry massively to scapegoat the EU for these annoyances.
"EU law"... you mean "regulation", that to prevent some "abuse".
Here, EU is not quite doing the right thing: the web need "noscript/basic (x)html" compatibility more than cookie regulation. Being jailed into a whatng cartel web engine does much more harm than cookie tracking (and some could use a long cryptographic URL parameter anyway).
Basically, a web "site" would be a "noscript/basic (x)html)" portal, and a web "app" would require a whatng cartel web engine (geeko/webkit/blink).
I do remember clearly a few years back, I was able to buy on amazon with the lynx browser... yep basic HTML forms can do wonders.
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.
> 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.
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 about being "essential" or not, not about tracking. Also keep in mind with enough preferences you could have unique or near-unique fingerprint of preferences which could be used for tracking.
I love this website but yeah that banner really bothered me. 100% appreciate the effort to reduce cookies & the commitment to avoid 3rd-party, the tongue-in-cheek "legally required" flies completely in the face of all that effort - especially given it's misinformed & not in fact legally required at all.
I’m interested to hear which country forces a cookie banner for any cookie, because the EU only requires it for tracking cookies and this website does net specify whether it’s used for that purpose.
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.
I rarely if ever put a cookie notice as the sites I tend to work on are only going to have 1 cookie for user sessions which is essential functionality and thus cannot be opted out of. It doesn't collect/store/share data so it's not something that needs the opt out banner.
It's still stupid though as most of the sites I do absolutely still track certain activity, it's just done server side.
If one wants full control cookies could just be disabled by default at the browser level (which also blocks local storage). I do this and just whitelist sites that actually need it (very few).
The issue is some sites won't display any content without cookies, even if it's unnecessary. The amount of React-using sites that will load the entire page only to a second later to fully blank out since the JS couldn't set local storage does get annoying (and can regularly be worked around by disabling Javascript if not used for anything substantial). A handful like this have appeared just this past week on the HN front page.
A further problem is that some if not most sites (that employ any kind of tracking in the first place) do so through a variety of means in no way limited to cookies. Addressing the core problem without legislation that captures intent is not feasible without a new protocol and document data type.
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.
They would never do this willingly, because they don't want you to automatically opt out of tracking.
The annoyance of the cookie banners is the entire draw for companies. Its not a downside. They're user-hostile. You are their enemy. Their goal is to wear you down and trick you into opting-in, so they can both track with impunity and follow the law.
Cookies are the easiest way to keep track of a user, but if browsers regularly stop sending cookies then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users and then we're back to square one with the law still requiring publishers to receive opt-in approval, but with no requirements on how.
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.
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.
> they're going to get threatening emails from regulators saying "Hey, you don't have a cookie banner".
That literally does not happen. What world do you live in?
But just to entertain your scenario let's say that did happen: it still wouldn't matter because they could just reply and tell them why they don't need one...
So, this story is from people who heard things? I can guarantee you that regulators have zero time for proactively looking for MISSING cookie banners. If they had time, they'd crack down proactively on the cookie consent management systems used by thousands of websites that do not comply with the regulation, because they implement the reject option as a dark pattern. Furthermore, this weird fantasy request you just described can easily be dismissed by the website operators with a single sentence: We don't use cookies, hence no cookie banner.
Individuals and other businesses have to complain to regulators about others not complying with the GDPR.
A cookie banner still doesn't prove compliance. You're still going to have to prove that you don't track users who didn't opt-in. A cookie banner doesn't help anything with that.
GDPR has nothing to do with cookie banners first of all.
Also, literally how the process works is, any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines and have to prove compliance to an incompetent non-technical person to stop the inquiries.
It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers recommend this regardless of what you’re doing.
> any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines
Of course you're not at risk for millions of fines because that's not how the process works.
If the relevant agency gets off its ass and decides to actually work on the complaint (very highly unlikely, unfortunately), they will first contact you and ask you to remedy the situation within some time frame (usually quite generous).
If you don't do that, they contact you again and tell you you might be fined for not doing what you're asked.
The only way for you to risk millions is to repeatedly knowingly violate the regulation.
> It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers
Ah yes. The famously competent technical people, those lawyers.
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.
So you don't believe in extrapolating from past experiences elsewhere? Good luck with that as you go through life. Personally, I don't do anything so formal as calculating Markov chains, but I certainly think that patterns of past behavior allow you to guess what other people are likely to do.
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's not legally required in terms of law, but it is legally required in the way that the legal department will complain if the banner not there. Checklists and all that. ;)
>Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
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
Different jurisdictions differ. Even if you collect your own and it contains identifying points, laws like GDPR will require you to attain informed consent before you collect it, along with methods for people deleting their data, and a million et als.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
I love this. Internet UIs have completely degraded over the last decade and seeing an actual company decide to try something different is beautiful. I barely see devs or designers try anything new. This team even added a screen saver if you leave the tab open and inactive for a bit! Wonderful.
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.
I would give anything to have a linux window manager that looks and behaves just like this. I said this to my coworkers in slack and they said that my age is showing, which is probably true. everything on this website is so easy to find, it just feels good. icons and color scheme is perfect as well.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
On the Posthog dashboard, you can activate a chatbot 'hog' which walks around the screen, but you can control it with WASD, and even jump up onto 'ledges' that correspond with the divs of the page you're on. There's a hidden "party mode" where you can see/chat to your other team members' hogs!
Seems kind of redundant -- I don't need a window manager in a website. If i want to open several articles at once, can't i just open several browser windows in the window manager I'm already running?
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what looked like an operating system. The desktop isn't the OS. Windows and Mac only allow one desktop on their OS, but Linux makes the separation clear.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
Please fix JS dependence (load more on server side, especially at first load, since your site doesn't render anything with JS disabled), accessibility, INP, security headers and structured data, and you'll then have a perfect, optimized marketing site for tech nerds. :) Love your brand, keep up the great work!
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.
The UX problem with emulating windows within web pages is that if you do it convincingly enough (like this website does), the users will unconsciously use windows shortcuts, like alt+F4 to close the window, which closes the whole browser.
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.
I didn't like working with posthog when I had to because the level of analytics they do goes against my personal ethics viewpoint but I do have to say they do very good technical work. The landing page is a good reflection of the skill they have even in the product itself. Very neat landing page, and I chuckled at their "cookie banner".
Well, it does look a lot like Windows, macOS, and many Linux desktop environments. Yes, it might feel unfamiliar to people who have only used tablets or phones.
I understand that, but it behaves very differently to what's usually expected of such a website where you can maybe search by Cmd + F, or more importantly have it correctly indexed by search engines. The latter is probably not that straight forward with such a page structure.
just tried it myself,
The minimize animation went to the upper right, and I found the window again in the little icon that looks like a calendar. The same icon dances when you minimize a window, if you are looking at it. It also shows a count of the number of open windows.
I never woulda looked at that icon without observing the animation
If you tap an item in the merch store on mobile there’s no indication it’s loading, and then over a second later finally loads, but at least it looks good? Ugh
Trying to look at the changelog and the roadmap, and what a spectacularly shitty way this was made.
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.
I think this is a terrible idea from a usability standpoint. Why reinvent windows in CSS? Desktop browsers can already open multiple pages in multiple windows. And it's all neatly integrated in my OS where I can use keyboard shortcuts to maximize, minimize, close, move windows, or place the windows on multiple monitors, etc.
It's as much a bad idea as websites trying to reinvent scrollbars. No thanks. I prefer to use my native windows and scrollbars.
I had to look at their website to find doc recently and I found that highly stupid and frustrating.
It didn't pushed me to want to use their service.
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...
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.
The solution to long scrollable web pages is a website that pretends to be an OS that has lots of long scrollable web pages inside a non-scrollable webpage.
That'd be great if I could navigate the in-browser browser with my pgup/pgn or arrow keys, but I can't. If you're going to go this route, you really should do comprehensive accessibility testing.
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.
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.
Hi, OP here. I was employee #13 at PostHog, joining as a designer (who now moonlights as a design engineer). I'm responsible for the website. I've been part of crafting the brand for 4.5 years – joined when the company just started monetizing.
There are only two of us who work on the website, myself and a front end engineer. (He was hired to work on the website and doesn't directly work in the product.)
We've spent roughly half of the last six months on this site. Other than our incredible graphic designer, no other resources were brought in.
A lot of our time is spent on brand-related side quests – they're consistently a net positive for the brand. You can see some examples under "Some things we've shipped" at https://posthog.com/teams/brand
This was a passion project of mine. I'm the one who ultimately chose to spend time I did on it. I think what we built is really cool, and I hope it serves as inspiration for other designers to think outside the box when it comes to solving their unique challenges.
Every company operates differently. Yes, many companies do have employees with too much time on their hands. Others do waste a lot of money in advertising. And a lot of companies are stagnating.
The teams window seems to be broken for me, on a non latest version of Firefox. However the blog posts window in the submission works flawlessly.
In the teams window, The first page doesn't load the images but does the content, clicking another item in the menu does show the expected page but again with no images. At some point, clicking the menu items does not load the correct page. At some point after that the images load in, however the correct link to the correct post does not appear. I have to click about 6 times on the same menu link to see a cycling of different posts (possibly the ones I was clicking before) to see the expected post.
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.
I threw a (much more limited) version of a "desktop" website together in about a couple of hours.
http://xgpu.net/ is about an ongoing project for an external gpu for the Atari range of 16-bit (and actually I even have plans to make it work on the 8-bit range) computers. It's somewhat in limbo at the moment because I just moved continent and most of my stuff is on a ship in the Atlantic. Once that arrives, and we start to settle in, I'll get back to it.
While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.
I wonder if they already ran the A/B tests or are they still running it. If they did and this proves to be more successful than what they had before, then it changes a lot how I think about website design.
Why can't I use my keyboard (e.g. spacebar) to scroll on you website? Apparently I have to use a mouse all the time, and that's annoying. Most OS's have accessibility options (even a lot of websites do this).
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.
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.
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".
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
yes I am getting tired of the "scroll documents" design. The navigation is clear and useful. I feel easy browsing all the functionalities of your website. Kudos!
One thing I feed inconvenient is how to close all windows and start from the desktop again. The dinosaur is cool!
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.
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.
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.
> That’s the idea behind the new PostHog.com. You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
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.
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.
This is a pet peeve of mine - but with a phone with a small display (eg iPhone 12 mini) it feels like 1/3rd of the screen is taken up with ‘menu bars/banners’ between browser url bar/site nav bars/bottom banner i can’t dismiss about talking to an AI
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/
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.
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 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.
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
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.
It is fun and I like it
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Changing the product line to fit the marketing narrative sounds like putting the cart before the horse.
That is not what I said. But youre a CTO, so Im not surprised. Stick to your lane of expertise perhaps.
> 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.
Yes - it's a very enjoyable experience!
> 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.
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.
You are jumping from a discussion about UI design to one about technology and implementation.
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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.
It’s because they can see it.
They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.
There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.
The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…
More like they can see it but also can't see it. There's megabytes of JS loaded just to show me a crappy glorified PDF that doesn't even work properly. A page I could have literally made using only HTML and CSS and it would be better, but somehow you've made it take 11mb of JavaScript code and it doesn't even work properly. That's the kind of website I scoff at.
I have no issues at all with this website. It's awesome. I mean it's a bit slow but that's probably because it's on the front page on HN right now - yet it still works pretty well. The design is delightful. Incredibly well done. One of the coolest websites I've seen. Who cares how much JS it takes, it's obviously worth it.
> 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.
Pet peeve of mine: Huge headers on webpages that is sticky for no reason (looking at you, ACM Digital Library)
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.
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>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*
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.
if, by way of totally random example, each feature team within each department measures how much revenue and how many customers come because of a specific feature that team is working on and responsibly, and that feature team's pm is compensated based on these metrics, then naturally each team will want to bloat the landing space on the front page areas as much as possible. very hard to make something that presents as cohesively as this when incentives of those involved are in competition with one another.
Agreed. Conway's Law. Every time I ever fought that law, the law won.
While I visually like the design, what's so innovative about a menu?
That observation seems wild to me as well. He just described every nav menu.
> 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.
Is this satire?
Usability and perf experience for me:
- 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?
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.
Im not sure gimp being constrained to a single window would constitute a multi-document interface.
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 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 mean, old photoshop versions (CS3?) also used multiple windows, so if I were to take a guess that’s where Gimp got it from.
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.
Well it subsumes app groups, I think? If anything app groups become just a default/prebuilt grouping policy.
> 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.
[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Eros
Well, yeah, it doesn't fit all applications and web browsers are a case where MDI doesn't really work. The linked site is more of a gimmick, at least as far as the documents go.
But my response was about calling MDI an anti-pattern in general. Just because it doesn't fit all cases, it doesn't mean it is an anti-pattern.
Oh no I get that the in-site MDI is a funny stylistic choice, and I've no problem with it. But the thing it's poking fun at is in-browser MDI, hence the comment.
I stand by the anti-pattern comment. I think there are very, very few cases where ‘MDI’ is appropriate, and I put it in quotes because the things being managed in that case are almost never ‘documents’ in any meaningful sense (rather they're some kind of graph node). Functionality apps build with MDI is basically always independent of the actual app and would be better implemented in the window manager — and more often than not there's actually no additional functionality over even the lowest common denominator of window managers.
What about Cocoa?
Because browsers only remember the last set of open windows reliably.
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.
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.
One could argue that this affordance should be provided by the OS for a unified experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 don't really see the point of mixing tmux sessions and tmux windows.
sessions let you group windows. i have a group/session for each project/purpose. one session is for all remote connections. one for my personal stuff, diary, etc. one for my hobby. one for personal dev projects, one for client work.
sessions also means that i can connect to tmux from multiple terminal windows. i generally have two windows, one for dev work and one for everything else.
generally i feel that having more than half a dozen windows in a session makes the session unwieldy, harder to navigate, because it becomes more difficult to find the window i am looking for.
which would be the same problem if each was a gui window. try to find your way around 20 gui windows.
I just logically group tabs into the same terminal window. All OS's have hotkeys for switching between tabs and windows.
sure that works, but then you are also using terminal functionality and not the window manager, which still shows the window manager as lacking in features, which was the argument i was responding to.
seriously, a window manager that can group windows and manage those groups would be awesome. workspaces help, but they are often just there, and can't be managed, reordered, named, etc..
actually, i think kde may have some of that functionality.
i still prefer tmux in any case because it is more scriptable, and it provides a detach function. although i recently started exploring wezterm, which can be configured to work like tmux and also has a way to detach and reattach sessions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241
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.
>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.
It adds a ton of overhead in general. Perhaps there is a subset of the website that could be a single page app or apps. But the entire website? yuck.
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.
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.
It would be one impressively long block of text if you tried to put all of this page's content in it.
Almost perfect. Inspirational.
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;
})();I just wanted to say, this is a very nice example of clean vanilla JavaScript. Well done!
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...
It took a good 20 seconds for it to fully load in Firefox on Android.
Firefox?
I had the same issue then tried edge and it was smooth.
I opened it in Firefox and it was perfectly smooth.
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.
Opera Mobile here. Performance is bad.
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.
Google doesn't know it only sees a happy user
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.
Me too, think it's neat:) But it seems like the majority of the comments on HN dislikes it though.
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.
The site is surprisingly useable on mobile.
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.
Im struggling to find the words but ill try:
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'll consider a refresh button just for you. Thanks for the kind words.
> 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:
The EU law is fine, the implementation used isn't. But never blame the EU laws for cookie banners; the law does not mandate banners at all, let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway. That's all the industry.
The industry could have come up with a standard, a browser add-on, respect a browser setting, etc but they chose the most annoying one to pester you, the user.
> let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway.
In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that. Of course tech companies have a loosy-goosy relationship with the law at the best of times.
Yeah, and only when (I think) Google got a hefty fine did the banner implementations start to add an instant "opt-out" button. The tech companies really try to skirt the rules as closely as possible.
I'm glad I'm not in EU legal, it's gotta be like dealing with internet trolls ("I didn't ACTUALLY break any rules because your rules don't say I can't use the word "fhtagn"")
The #1 problem with the cookie law is that it's not enforced.
Start fining sites with dark pattern banners and they'll start going away.
I feel like the #1 problem with the cookie law is that the vast majority of websites need to do something in order to comply while keeping their business model and the law hasn't provided a clear direction for how to comply with it.
If they had done that, nobody would be making cookie banners wrong.
> In fact the law pretty explicitly disallows dark patterns like that.
Yes. For "cookie banners" the law in fact forbids hiding "Reject all non-essential and continue" to be given less visual weight than "Accept all and continue", let alone hiding it behind "More details" or other additional steps.
It also requires consent to be informed (i.e. you need to know what you're agreeing to) and specific (i.e. you can't give blanket consent, the actual categories of data and purposes of collection need to be spelled out) and easily revokable (which is almost never the case - most sites provide no direct access to review your options later once you've "opted in").
One good example I can think of for a "cookie banner" that gets this right is the WordPress plugin from DevOwl: https://devowl.io/wordpress-real-cookie-banner/ (this is not an ad, but this is the one I've been recommending to people after having tried several of them) because it actually adds links to the footer that let you review and change your consent afterwards.
EDIT: Sorry, I first misread "disallows" as "allows". I've amended my reply accordingly.
> The EU law is fine
Kind of. The intent is good and the wording disallows some of the dark patterns. The challenge is that it stands square in the path of the adtech surveillance behemoths. That we ended up with the cesspit of cookie banners is a result of (almost) immovable object meeting (almost) irresistable force. There was simply no way that Google, Facebook et al were ever going to comply with the intent of the law: it's their business not to.
The only way we might have got a better outcome was for the EU to quickly respond and say "nope, cookie banners aren't compliant with the law". That would have been incredibly difficult to do in practice. You can bet your Bay Area mortgage that Big Tech will have had legions of smart lawyers pouring over how to comply with the letter whilst completely ignoring the intent.
GDPR requires informed consent before collecting data. It's a wonder we don't have to force everyone through an interstitial consent page.
Yes, this sounds good. This sounds like something desirable. I mean, this is the expectation literally everywhere else so... why not the web?
Also, data collection is fully a choice. You can always choose not to. I've built websites with logins and everything and guess what - no cookie banners necessary. Just don't collect data you don't need.
> GDPR requires informed consent before collecting data.
And this is a good thing, no? I certainly think so.
> It's a wonder we don't have to force everyone through an interstitial consent page.
If the information being tracked is truly essential to the site/app (session management and authorisation data for instance) then no consent is needed, for anything else ask before you store it, and most certainly ask before you share it with your “partners” or anyone else.
The EU law isn't fine.
Many websites are free because they survive from ads. Ads make more money if you collect data. The EU law essentially cut the revenue of all these websites. Their choice is to not collect data (meaning less revenue) or show a popup (meaning more bounce rate, which means less revenue).
People who think this is a good thing are being short-sighted. That's because this law mainly affects websites that host information that visitors visit from clicking on links on the web. If a website is like Facebook or Youtube, where users must sign up first or probably already have an account, they will be able to collect data for ads with or without banners since they have their own ToS for creating an account, and they can infer a lot from how the user uses their services.
I'm not saying privacy regulation is a bad thing. It made countless businesses reconsider how they handle people's data. But it's clear to me that there are two problems.
First, this regulation hurts all the small websites that need to exist in order for we have to have a healthy "web." A lot of these are making only barely their hosting costs in ads, so there is no way they can afford the counsel to figure out how to comply with laws from another continent. If we had another way to support these websites, this wouldn't be a problem, but ads are really the lifeblood of half of the internet, and almost nobody wants to donate or pay a subscription.
Second, this regulation doesn't even really protect people's private data in the end, which may give users a false sense of security because they have the GDPR on their side. I forgot the name, but there was a recent gossiping app that required the user to upload a photo in order to sign up, which should be deleted afterwards, but they never deleted it and when the app was hacked the attacker had access to photos of all users. It's the same thing with GDPR. We can tell when a website is clearly not complying with the GDPR, but there is no way to tell if they actually complied with the GDPR until the server gets hacked.
Even the way they comply with GDPR isn't enough to protect users' privacy, e.g. if you have an account on Discord and you want your data deleted, they will simply turn every post your made into an "anonymous" post. This means if you sent a message that discloses your private information on Discord, that will never get deleted because its outside the scope of compliance. You could literally say "Hi, my name is XYZ, I live in ABC" and they won't delete that because you consented to provide that information, they will just change your username from "xyz" to "anonymous" or something like that.
I still wonder what are the actual benefits of GDPR with these cookie banners when 99% of the users just stay on Facebook and Youtube anyway.
> Many websites are free because they survive from ads. Ads make more money if you collect data.
My business is to get money out of other people's wallets and bank accounts. I could get make much money if you just logged into your bank account and approved transactions whenever I told you to, or screamed less whenever I took the wallet out of your pocket on my own.
That there's a way to earn more money does not justify it as legitimate thing to do, and if you can't figure out how to run a service in legitimate ways does not mean that illegitimate ways that attempt to violate its users in secret suddenly become okay.
> First, this regulation hurts all the small websites that need to exist in order for we have to have a healthy "web."
there is nothing healthy about force-feeding ads optimized via collected data.
I read an interview with a bunch of different young people. They all basically said "I just click 'yes' or 'accept' automatically". It sounded like they all believed that this was something they had to do in order to get to the content.
Bad implementation of the EU law indeed, as another comment said. It fails the purpose completely and just create more problems for nearly everyone.
In many cases it is required to access the content. Courts have allowed "Consent or pay" for sites such as newspapers.
If 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 isn't saying that you shouldn't have options, rather that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators to provide a unified solution that is agreeable to users instead of leaving it completely wide open to malicious compliance.
These kind of laws need to be careful to not stifle true innovation, so it is understandable why it wanted to remain wide open at the onset. But, now that we're in the thick of it, maybe there is a point where we can agree that popup dialogs that are purposefully designed to be annoying are in volition of the spirit and that the law should be amended to force a better solution?
> that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators
1. The law isn't about browsers or websites. It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
2. The world's largest advertising company could do all you describe. And they do work with websites. First by repackaging tracking through FLoC. Then by just simply repackaging tracking and calling it privacy: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923
> It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.
Obviously. And where there are problems in those domains equal specificity would be asked for. But since we're talking about in the context of browsers specifically...
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.
Seems like it's working then? Because the website chose to (optionally) track you, you need to go through a minor annoyance to accept it. You're effectively making a choice that you're fine with this annoyance (since you keep using the website) and since you're accepting it, you're fine with being tracked.
Other people already get two choices to make here which they didn't get before, which is a win in my book. Seeing the banner, you can decide to avoid the website and if you still wanna use the website, you can chose if you allow them to track you by PII or not.
I get the choice, but I make the choice I like less because it is more convenient to make it. If we only look at the positives, then the situation is better. But we have to look at the cost, and there is a cost, in terms of time and mental effort, to read the banner, figure out what the choices are, and if I am not accepting all cookies, how to go through the process of rejecting some of them. Sometimes it's very involved.
Also, I am an educated consumer and understand what a cookie is. Most people do not and do whatever is necessary to make the consent screen go away. Because of that, effectively they don't get this choice.
As one of the parent posts said, if it was implemented on the browser level, I would get the choice, and the cost of making the right choice would be smaller. If the defaults were to "reject unnecessary cookies" then most of the population would get the benefit.
The way it is right now feels like a net negative. Most people don't know what the consent is about and will not spend the time to learn it. Companies still find ways to track you that agrees with the letter but not the spirit of the law. I have friction whenever visiting a new website (or an old one that forgot my choice). The only winners are people who don't value their time and are smart enough to understand cookie consent. That's a small percentage of the general population.
> The way it is right now feels like a net negative.
That's because the tracking is a net negative.
Tracking is negative. However, tracking + mandatory badly implemented consent banners everywhere feels even worse to me than just tracking alone.
The worst part. The one cookie that should remember your choice NEVER works. Never.
It doesn’t matter what site I visit and what choice I do. The next day, every single website asks me to pass through the banners again.
Try UBlock Origin. It blocks stupid banners just fine. And it doesn't mean that you give your consent.
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.
Well, it works, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the website owners doing it, since in practice the frustration lands on the EU lawmakers. That just makes the law bad: it doesn’t really prevent anything, and it leaves people a little more anti-EU.
How many billions of human hours of productivity have we collectively wasted with these cookie banners?
Always remember it is the web site owner who chose to waste your time.
The more obnoxious the cookie banner, the quicker you can conclude "I didn't really need to visit your site anyway".
Most probably magnitudes less than those wasted on advertisement and the resulting unnecessary purchases.
Under German law, the BGB (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, German civil law book defining most private laws) provides very specific and concrete provisions for liabilities and duties in most business transactions and commercial exchanges of goods and services and even employment. It's not necessary to agree to formal contractual obligations in writing for most service agreements unless you want to add additional obligations or explicitly waive ones prescribed by the BGB (and some in fact can't be waived or not entirely) - if you can prove an agreement was made that falls under the BGB's laws, those laws apply to it regardless of the existence of a written and signed contract. And yet it's extremely uncommon not to have a written contract for serious business relations and most contracts explicitly insist on signatures (in fact in German contract law, the legal phrase "in Schriftform", literally "in writing", is defined in such a way it specifically requires a document signed by both parties whereas for "in Textform", literally "in text", even an e-mail or text message would be sufficient).
It's not cookie banners that are wasting productivity, it's mutual distrust and the need to protect against it. "Cookie banners" (or more correctly: consent forms) are legal contracts. The reason they are often so annoying to navigate is that the companies that built them want to try to trick you into agreeing to things you have no interest in agreeing to or might even have an interest in not agreeing to. Technically the law forbids this but it's still more profitable to risk the fine than to abide by the law.
Or to put it another way: there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article. The consent form isn't for reading the article, it's for what the site wants to do to you (or your data - which includes all data collected about you because the GDPR defines that as being yours, too) while you're reading the article.
The GDPR doesn't make you waste time on cookie banners. The GDPR grants you ownership of all personally identifiable information of you and about you - it creates legal rights and protections you previously didn't have. Cookie banners exist because companies want to infringe upon those rights. Most cookie banners are difficult to navigate because most companies don't want you to understand what you're agreeing to (and on second order because they want you to blame the law granting you rights rather than them for infringing upon those rights).
You also can't have capitalism without bureaucracy. There's no such thing as stateless capitalism because states allow for capital to exist. Without states, you'd have to justify your claims to your peers and anything in excess of what you can justify for personal needs would be considered hoarding and wasteful. And in order to have a state, you need bureaucracy to structure the operation of that state for it to act as a cohesive entity.
Rights don't make sense without bureaucracy because they only have meaning when you deal with them at that layer of abstraction. You can't respect and infringe "rights" interpersonally. You can act ethically or unethically, you can be nice or a bit of a dick, you can harm or help. But rights only become necessary as a concept when you have processes that need to interact with them and abstract entities that uphold and enforce them. Rights allow you to sue or call the police. But without rights you can't have capitalism. States enforce property rights literally at the end of a gun (and this includes "state property" too in case you were wondering about so-called "communist" states).
Dude, I was in France and browsed to a page and it was a full page cookie modal with like 3 buttons and all these sliders. Turns out everywhere in the EU has these insane page things.
The entire point of the law was to make websites using extraneous cookies and trackcing annoying to use. It's not something that can be solved in the browser _at all_. What I guess no one expected is that most websites would just decide to go on and pester their users rather than stop the tracking -- and that users would still continue using those websites.
I don't agree. It is the main way I am being informed that some sites I attempt to use, share my data with thousands of external partners, for no relevant function. I do not believe this information would be divulged to me and the public, if voluntary. The public is mistreated in innumerable ways, starting by not letting them know it is happening.
> the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookies
This is only an option if you limit tracking to using cookies. But neither tracking technologies, nor the current EU law, are limited to tracking via cookies. It also kills functionality for many web applications without also accepting all tracking. Some browser-flavors went to extreme lengths to prevent tracking through other means (eg fixed window size, highly generic header settings, ...).
Maybe I am mistaken, but it seriously frustrates me how much people within the relevant field make this mistake of conflating tracking and cookies and come to this "it would be so simple" solution.
A welcome update to the law would be to allow a header flag to opt out/in (or force the do-not-track header to have this functionality) preventing the banner from showing.
The pessimist in me thinks a legally enforced header and corresponding browser setting (so that the user wouldn't have to make an explicit choice per website) would have met enough pushback from businesses for the EU to back down to something with the infinite stupidity of the current solution.
Maybe we could move towards that end in small steps. The EU should start by banning irrelevant non-sequiturs like "We value your privacy" and other misleading or at best distracting language. It can then abandon the notion that users are at all interested in fine-grained choice, and enforce that consent and non-consent to non-essential statekeeping are two clearly distinguished and immediately accessible buttons. No one wants to partially block tracking.
It seems as though the EU is operating under the notion that this is all a matter of consumer choice, as though any informed consumer would choose to have tabs kept on them by 50 trackers if not for the inconvenience of figuring out which button stops them.
Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) has existed for over 20 years and no one wanted to implement it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P
No, it is not that. It highlighted an issue, and it makes it painfully obvious when a particular page is being extra ignorant about your privacy and trying to sell it to thousand vendors instead of a handful.
What I don't like about cookie popups isn't the popup (which isn't something the EU law dictated btw), it's that someone thought it was okay to have hundreds of advertisement vendors and data brokers on a single news article, and it's better to know so I can just close the tab and never interact with that webpage again if they're being excessive asshats.
They have failed at enforcing this properly though, in particular with the recent proliferation of "legitimate interest" abuse (it is only legitimate interest if it an implied component to a service I am directly requesting), and the general issue of popups illegally making rejection different from acceptance, intentionally making rejection slow, or even requiring payment to continue without cookies. And yes, the occasionally completely defective prompt.
I do agree that it would be neater if the browser handled this though. Would also be neater if the internet wasn't entirely sponsored by privacy violations. :/
> 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.
> By any objective measure
Number of sites using google analytics on my browsing session with my consent has gone down
Very little? The norm used be to slap google analytics on everything. Suddenly everybody thinks about compliance — especially those who didn't even have idea there was something wrong.
Many sites ditched tracking altogether so they don't have to have banners. Everybody is aware of GDPR so you can be pretty confident that when european site has no banner it doesn't track you.
Could the law be better? Sure I would love to ban tracking altogether. But this was lobbied to hell by AD companies. Everybody was kicking and screaming because they want all the data. And we still got something that helps. That is a win.
And you can see how industry hates it in way they implement the banners. It is annoying and confusing on purpose. You could comply in nice way but when you need to share the data with your 141 ad partners and each one gets their own checkbox… good luck.
Same reason nobody was respecting the dont track me flag. The industry is absolutely and exclusively to blame here.
The law has wasted billions of hours of human life and productivity. Was it worth it?
Law was created as response to advertisers invading privacy, are you arguing that unchecked invasion of your privacy is worth it? If anything unchecked invasion of privacy wasted all of those hours plus hours of work of lawmakers plus hours of work while implementing all that advertising in the first place…
Ads industry did that. Was it worth it?
The ads industry isn’t in the business of making our lives easier. EU lawmakers are. Which is why it’s the EU that is failing in its mission here.
So you know who “bad guys” are and you still make strawman argument?
> The ads industry isn’t in the business of making our lives easier.
Indeed. So somehow you still end up blaming the EU.
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”.
Have you seen the 300 individual checkboxes you need to disable? Or the hoops that the advertising industry went through to claim that “Do-Not-Track” didn’t count for:
> In the context of the use of information society services, and notwithstanding Directive 2002/58/EC, the data subject may exercise his or her right to object by automated means using technical specifications.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...
Article 4, Section 21.5
The malicious compliance is more that they all refused to add the one-click opt-out until a high-profile enforcement against Google brought them to heel.
that’s just noncompliance. and the one-click opt-out still implies one click, which implies the cookie banners
The "malicious" compliance came from the trick that accepting / opting-in was fast and almost instant, but rejecting / opting-out was a slow and arduous process, and it required lawsuits and fines [0] for companies to comply.
I found a website that lists all fines handed out for violating the GDPR: [1]
[0] Google fined €325 million by French CNIL for placing cookies without consent https://www.cnil.fr/en/cookies-and-advertisements-inserted-b...
[1] https://www.dsgvo-portal.de/gdpr-fines/gdpr-fine-against-goo...
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.
It’s because those were made to be bad solution by very advertising companies wanting people to be denied their rights and making it look like law is bad instead of implementation being bad
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)
Well, I mean, we could go the route Safari has, and just blanket-disable 3rd party cookies by default. It's... quite effective (if a tad annoying for folks implementing single-sign-on)
I don't know, I don't think it helps all that much when you are up against Facebook's, and Google's wits on how to circumvent it.
If they can open a port and side-step the security system of Android wholesale, they can probably find a "solution" to the not even that hard of a problem of doing tracking server-side.
There is a problem in convincing everyone on the internet to install a server-side tracking component.
Pretty much everyone was willing to give this away for free on the client side, in return for limited social integration, or (in Google's case) free analytics - server side is a significantly harder sell in many companies, and there is a much richer variety of backend languages/frameworks you have to integrate with.
We don't need the functional/tracking cookie split - the law already thought of this.
If you're using functional cookies, you don't have to ask. If you're still asking, you're just wasting your time.
The reason every website asks is because:
1. They're stupid and don't even bother to preliminarily research the laws they comply with.
2. They actually are tracking you.
Ultimately if you're using something like Google Analytics, then yeah you probably do need a banner. Even if it's just a blog.
Great, so then don't do that.
lol this is what it used to be like back in the day. We have forgotten the old ways and now we yearn for them. Every tutorial instructed old people to just click Always Allow or else they would not be able to read their webmail.
The law is fine. The industry has just decided that dragging its heels and risking fines is better than actual compliance.
Most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use aren't compliant.
EU law requires "Accept All" and "Reject All Non-Essential" be both equally easy to access and given equal weight (or rather: the latter can't be given less weight and made more difficult to access, which almost all of these scripts blatantly ignore).
Browser vendors can't solve this because the question isn't technical but legal. It's not about first-party vs third-party cookies (let alone same-origin vs cross-origin) but about the purposes of those cookies - and not just cookies but all transferred data (including all HTTP requests).
You don't need to (and in fact can't) opt into technically necessary cookies like session cookies for a login and such. It's plausible that these might even be cross-origin (as long as the other domain is controlled by the same legal entity). If they're provided by a third party, that would indeed be data sharing that warrants a disclosure and opt in (or rather: this can only happen once the user acknowledges this but they have no option to refuse and still use the service if it can't plausibly be provided without this).
The GDPR and ePrivacy laws (and the DMA and DSA) have done a lot for privacy but most of what they have done has happened behind the scenes (as intended) by changing how companies operate. The "cookie management" is just the user-facing part of those companies' hostile and dishonest reactions to these laws as well as a cottage industry of grifters providing "compliance" solutions for companies that can't afford the technical and legal expertise to understand what they actually need to do and think they can just tick a box by buying the right product/service.
Heck, most companies don't even provide legally compliant privacy policies and refuse to properly handly data access requests. The GDPR requires companies to disclose all third parties (or their categories if they can't disclose identities) your (specifically your) data has been shared with and the specific types of data, purposes of that sharing and legal basis for sharing it (i.e. if it required consent, how and when that consent was given) - and yet most will only link you to their generic privacy policy that answers none of those questions or only provides vague general answers or irrelevant details ("We and our 11708 partners deeply care about your privacy").
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> because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people
The law should have been just a browser setting sites had to follow, making it a "banner" has made it meritless pestering while pretending it's for my own good and allowing the worst offenders to make convoluted UI to try and trick you every site visit.
If the EU was a serious entity, they would just forbid cookies that are non-essential. Simple as that. Either you take your responsibility as a law maker serious, or you refrain from making laws entirely.
Or they would enforce it via the (unfortunately deprecated) do not track header.
As we all know, tracking is only reliant on cookies. And not things like "storing your geolocation for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
People ranting against cookie banners and GDPR literally never read the regulation itself and they literally never read what these banners are supposed to trick you into
> makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people
Which it is?
I am from the EU and I don't see what this law has accomplished apart from making the WWW worse, especially on mobile.
I remember back when Opera was a paid browser, last century, it already have options to accept all cookies, refuse them, or set fine-grained preferences per website. No need for handling it at the website level if the client can do it.
> making the WWW worse
You can argue that the law might not have improved things (at least not as much as intended), but nothing about this law has made the WWW worse. If you believe that, you've fallen for the concerted efforts of the advertising industry spreading misinformation about who's idea the annoying consent popups were & (like this website) perpetuating the myth that they're a legal requirement.
None of the new annoyances on the modern web that you're thinking about are mandated by EU law. It benefits the ad industry massively to scapegoat the EU for these annoyances.
"EU law"... you mean "regulation", that to prevent some "abuse".
Here, EU is not quite doing the right thing: the web need "noscript/basic (x)html" compatibility more than cookie regulation. Being jailed into a whatng cartel web engine does much more harm than cookie tracking (and some could use a long cryptographic URL parameter anyway).
Basically, a web "site" would be a "noscript/basic (x)html)" portal, and a web "app" would require a whatng cartel web engine (geeko/webkit/blink).
I do remember clearly a few years back, I was able to buy on amazon with the lynx browser... yep basic HTML forms can do wonders.
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.
> 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.
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.)
It's about being "essential" or not, not about tracking. Also keep in mind with enough preferences you could have unique or near-unique fingerprint of preferences which could be used for tracking.
I love this website but yeah that banner really bothered me. 100% appreciate the effort to reduce cookies & the commitment to avoid 3rd-party, the tongue-in-cheek "legally required" flies completely in the face of all that effort - especially given it's misinformed & not in fact legally required at all.
I’m interested to hear which country forces a cookie banner for any cookie, because the EU only requires it for tracking cookies and this website does net specify whether it’s used for that purpose.
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.
I rarely if ever put a cookie notice as the sites I tend to work on are only going to have 1 cookie for user sessions which is essential functionality and thus cannot be opted out of. It doesn't collect/store/share data so it's not something that needs the opt out banner.
It's still stupid though as most of the sites I do absolutely still track certain activity, it's just done server side.
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.
If one wants full control cookies could just be disabled by default at the browser level (which also blocks local storage). I do this and just whitelist sites that actually need it (very few).
The issue is some sites won't display any content without cookies, even if it's unnecessary. The amount of React-using sites that will load the entire page only to a second later to fully blank out since the JS couldn't set local storage does get annoying (and can regularly be worked around by disabling Javascript if not used for anything substantial). A handful like this have appeared just this past week on the HN front page.
A further problem is that some if not most sites (that employ any kind of tracking in the first place) do so through a variety of means in no way limited to cookies. Addressing the core problem without legislation that captures intent is not feasible without a new protocol and document data type.
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
They are not forced to use banners, they are forced to get explicit opt-in permission before tracking users, which can be done in non-obtrusive ways.
Okay, so regard the Do_Not_Track header as explicit opt-out permission
They would never do this willingly, because they don't want you to automatically opt out of tracking.
The annoyance of the cookie banners is the entire draw for companies. Its not a downside. They're user-hostile. You are their enemy. Their goal is to wear you down and trick you into opting-in, so they can both track with impunity and follow the law.
No your browser can just… choose not to send cookies. The website publisher has no say in that.
Cookies are the easiest way to keep track of a user, but if browsers regularly stop sending cookies then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users and then we're back to square one with the law still requiring publishers to receive opt-in approval, but with no requirements on how.
> then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users
Example: The identifier you get when you pass anti-bot challenges (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc).
That's not a cookie?
There's a reason the largest advertising company in the world hasn't sanctioned this move.
Ask your favorite advertising company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217269
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.
> they're going to get threatening emails from regulators saying "Hey, you don't have a cookie banner".
That literally does not happen. What world do you live in?
But just to entertain your scenario let's say that did happen: it still wouldn't matter because they could just reply and tell them why they don't need one...
They don't even have to reply, just make a note on your footer or something or have a page you can link to that explains it. I've done this before
So, this story is from people who heard things? I can guarantee you that regulators have zero time for proactively looking for MISSING cookie banners. If they had time, they'd crack down proactively on the cookie consent management systems used by thousands of websites that do not comply with the regulation, because they implement the reject option as a dark pattern. Furthermore, this weird fantasy request you just described can easily be dismissed by the website operators with a single sentence: We don't use cookies, hence no cookie banner.
Individuals and other businesses have to complain to regulators about others not complying with the GDPR.
And they can reply back: "Hey, you're wrong".
Doesn’t usually go over well with regulators. If they have to prove their site is fully compliant in court it would become mighty expensive to do so.
So, cookie banner it is.
A cookie banner still doesn't prove compliance. You're still going to have to prove that you don't track users who didn't opt-in. A cookie banner doesn't help anything with that.
You famously do not have to prove that you're innocent in court. Prosecution has to prove that you're guilty.
The same spine that makes companies say "No, I think we will keep our DE&I programs".
That's not how the process works.
GDPR has nothing to do with cookie banners first of all.
Also, literally how the process works is, any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines and have to prove compliance to an incompetent non-technical person to stop the inquiries.
It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers recommend this regardless of what you’re doing.
> Also, literally how the process works is
It literally doesn't work like that
> any citizen of an EU country files a complaint, and you’re suddenly at risk for millions in fines
Of course you're not at risk for millions of fines because that's not how the process works.
If the relevant agency gets off its ass and decides to actually work on the complaint (very highly unlikely, unfortunately), they will first contact you and ask you to remedy the situation within some time frame (usually quite generous).
If you don't do that, they contact you again and tell you you might be fined for not doing what you're asked.
The only way for you to risk millions is to repeatedly knowingly violate the regulation.
> It’s easier to throw up a banner, hence why most lawyers
Ah yes. The famously competent technical people, those lawyers.
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.
For that specific question, none. End.
So you don't believe in extrapolating from past experiences elsewhere? Good luck with that as you go through life. Personally, I don't do anything so formal as calculating Markov chains, but I certainly think that patterns of past behavior allow you to guess what other people are likely to do.
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.
It's not legally required in terms of law, but it is legally required in the way that the legal department will complain if the banner not there. Checklists and all that. ;)
I don't see any cookies saved anywhere. I do see four variables in localStorage, though.
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.
Let's see if one of these shady lawyers who make their money by finding these violations reads HN and gets into contact with them...
Could it be that they actually did not know that they don't need to show a banner if there is no third party cookie?
Or that this is their way of bragging that they don't use third-party cookies?
>Unless it's essential to the site functionality, in which case you don't need the banner at all.
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
Different jurisdictions differ. Even if you collect your own and it contains identifying points, laws like GDPR will require you to attain informed consent before you collect it, along with methods for people deleting their data, and a million et als.
Ahh yes. HN’s favorite debate.
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.
Just like a debate on any other topic? E.g., GNU/Linux on desktop.
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Gotta love the employees feet pics folder found in the trash bin: https://posthog.com/feet-pics
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.
It looks awesome but I clicked several bits and pieces and still have no idea what they do or what their product is.
Yeah I liked the aesthetic but left the site having no idea what I was even looking at or why I would care.
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.
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.
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.
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."
That's how most company websites are XD
But at least you clicked
I love this. Internet UIs have completely degraded over the last decade and seeing an actual company decide to try something different is beautiful. I barely see devs or designers try anything new. This team even added a screen saver if you leave the tab open and inactive for a bit! Wonderful.
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.
If one witnesses the spiciness first-hand, one will understand the comment above is fitting and appropriate.
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.
Absolute failure of UI/UX.
This is another hint that if your startup does something well the frontend barely matters.
I would give anything to have a linux window manager that looks and behaves just like this. I said this to my coworkers in slack and they said that my age is showing, which is probably true. everything on this website is so easy to find, it just feels good. icons and color scheme is perfect as well.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
On the Posthog dashboard, you can activate a chatbot 'hog' which walks around the screen, but you can control it with WASD, and even jump up onto 'ledges' that correspond with the divs of the page you're on. There's a hidden "party mode" where you can see/chat to your other team members' hogs!
Except look at it from a phone. (Developer tools if you don't have a phone).
I open a few pages and then press Command+W, that close the tab :/ muscle memory.
However, I really enjoy it!
Seems kind of redundant -- I don't need a window manager in a website. If i want to open several articles at once, can't i just open several browser windows in the window manager I'm already running?
More correctly, "our website looks like a desktop environment".
I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what looked like an operating system. The desktop isn't the OS. Windows and Mac only allow one desktop on their OS, but Linux makes the separation clear.
Spot on.
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..."
If I open my text editor and type:
I can make my editor look like an operating system.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.
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.
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.
I think that might be my favorite website. I love it, so much content.
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.
Please fix JS dependence (load more on server side, especially at first load, since your site doesn't render anything with JS disabled), accessibility, INP, security headers and structured data, and you'll then have a perfect, optimized marketing site for tech nerds. :) Love your brand, keep up the great work!
If you leave the page idle long enough you'll even see a screensaver.
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/
> 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 wonder how much, if anything, Geico pays to advertise on that page.
Zero, as Geico is owned by Berkshire.
The UX problem with emulating windows within web pages is that if you do it convincingly enough (like this website does), the users will unconsciously use windows shortcuts, like alt+F4 to close the window, which closes the whole browser.
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.
I didn't like working with posthog when I had to because the level of analytics they do goes against my personal ethics viewpoint but I do have to say they do very good technical work. The landing page is a good reflection of the skill they have even in the product itself. Very neat landing page, and I chuckled at their "cookie banner".
I'm not sure I would be brave enough to do experiments like that with my landing page. I wonder how it converts.
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.
Well, it does look a lot like Windows, macOS, and many Linux desktop environments. Yes, it might feel unfamiliar to people who have only used tablets or phones.
I understand that, but it behaves very differently to what's usually expected of such a website where you can maybe search by Cmd + F, or more importantly have it correctly indexed by search engines. The latter is probably not that straight forward with such a page structure.
I minimized ( _ ) the window on that page, and now I can’t find it any more. I expected some obvious place where you can un-minimize a window.
just tried it myself, The minimize animation went to the upper right, and I found the window again in the little icon that looks like a calendar. The same icon dances when you minimize a window, if you are looking at it. It also shows a count of the number of open windows.
I never woulda looked at that icon without observing the animation
nothing is loading but oh well. they do have one of the best open source django apps out there though
If you tap an item in the merch store on mobile there’s no indication it’s loading, and then over a second later finally loads, but at least it looks good? Ugh
Trying to look at the changelog and the roadmap, and what a spectacularly shitty way this was made.
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.
I think this is a terrible idea from a usability standpoint. Why reinvent windows in CSS? Desktop browsers can already open multiple pages in multiple windows. And it's all neatly integrated in my OS where I can use keyboard shortcuts to maximize, minimize, close, move windows, or place the windows on multiple monitors, etc.
It's as much a bad idea as websites trying to reinvent scrollbars. No thanks. I prefer to use my native windows and scrollbars.
I had to look at their website to find doc recently and I found that highly stupid and frustrating. It didn't pushed me to want to use their service.
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...
What’s it with the definitely not legally required “legally-required Cookie Banner“.
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.
The solution to long scrollable web pages is a website that pretends to be an OS that has lots of long scrollable web pages inside a non-scrollable webpage.
That'd be great if I could navigate the in-browser browser with my pgup/pgn or arrow keys, but I can't. If you're going to go this route, you really should do comprehensive accessibility testing.
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.
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.
Hi, OP here. I was employee #13 at PostHog, joining as a designer (who now moonlights as a design engineer). I'm responsible for the website. I've been part of crafting the brand for 4.5 years – joined when the company just started monetizing.
There are only two of us who work on the website, myself and a front end engineer. (He was hired to work on the website and doesn't directly work in the product.)
We've spent roughly half of the last six months on this site. Other than our incredible graphic designer, no other resources were brought in.
A lot of our time is spent on brand-related side quests – they're consistently a net positive for the brand. You can see some examples under "Some things we've shipped" at https://posthog.com/teams/brand
This was a passion project of mine. I'm the one who ultimately chose to spend time I did on it. I think what we built is really cool, and I hope it serves as inspiration for other designers to think outside the box when it comes to solving their unique challenges.
Every company operates differently. Yes, many companies do have employees with too much time on their hands. Others do waste a lot of money in advertising. And a lot of companies are stagnating.
But I can assure you, PostHog is none of those.
The teams window seems to be broken for me, on a non latest version of Firefox. However the blog posts window in the submission works flawlessly.
In the teams window, The first page doesn't load the images but does the content, clicking another item in the menu does show the expected page but again with no images. At some point, clicking the menu items does not load the correct page. At some point after that the images load in, however the correct link to the correct post does not appear. I have to click about 6 times on the same menu link to see a cycling of different posts (possibly the ones I was clicking before) to see the expected post.
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 can agree, but this doesnt seem like engineer boredom, more like manager or higher
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.
I threw a (much more limited) version of a "desktop" website together in about a couple of hours.
http://xgpu.net/ is about an ongoing project for an external gpu for the Atari range of 16-bit (and actually I even have plans to make it work on the 8-bit range) computers. It's somewhat in limbo at the moment because I just moved continent and most of my stuff is on a ship in the Atlantic. Once that arrives, and we start to settle in, I'll get back to it.
This is why we can't have nice things...
If I was an investor I would not be happy with my money being poured into this pointless project.
Can we just appreciate cool things please.
This looks good. Hope to see in the future, like bookmarking, etc, in the dashboard
While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.
Their https://posthog.com/404 is blue screen of death :)
Very cool. I guess the website worked, I just bought a nice mug from their store :D
I wonder if they already ran the A/B tests or are they still running it. If they did and this proves to be more successful than what they had before, then it changes a lot how I think about website design.
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.
As someone with a personal website which looks like an operating system, I support this trend!
This interface is very well done, great job!
Why can't I use my keyboard (e.g. spacebar) to scroll on you website? Apparently I have to use a mouse all the time, and that's annoying. Most OS's have accessibility options (even a lot of websites do this).
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.
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.
First ( and maybe only time ) I approve of usage of cookie bannner.
Chuckles…
Man if you did open-in-new-window instead of open-in-new-tab, you would get all of this "for free".
It's all marketing. But it's good marketing.
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".
- I open the link in a mobile browser.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
yes I am getting tired of the "scroll documents" design. The navigation is clear and useful. I feel easy browsing all the functionalities of your website. Kudos!
One thing I feed inconvenient is how to close all windows and start from the desktop again. The dinosaur is cool!
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.
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.
Serious question. Could one not write a whole desktop environment in a lisp (clojurescript) and serve it as a website?
How come you're asking that? Just curious
Someone needs to make a KDE, XFCE theme of this.
Yet both ctrl+click and vimium mostly work as expected. That's good.
Neat.
But the text on the sidebar moves by a few px when you hover the mouse over it.
Very annoying.
Easter egg: Trash > Employee feet pics
Curiosity got the best of me, opened it, pictures of feet.
"I'm not sure what I expected"
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.
This reminds me of how the web was decade(s?) ago. Reminds me of Jeffrey Zeldman's work. Love it
> That’s the idea behind the new PostHog.com. You can multitask, open a few articles simultaneously, and move them around as you please.
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.
Posthog you are the best but left sidebar just with icons is not great. Please expand it on hover.
This works, until you want to print the page (dead tree format or PDF format) and breaks everything.
Where is Doom?
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.
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?
I've occasionally looked, but I can't find it. If you can do better...!
St George Bank, Australia circa 2005
i hope this is a gimmick and not something that'll stay long term
This is a pet peeve of mine - but with a phone with a small display (eg iPhone 12 mini) it feels like 1/3rd of the screen is taken up with ‘menu bars/banners’ between browser url bar/site nav bars/bottom banner i can’t dismiss about talking to an AI
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/
Cute idea, but super janky on mobile.
Looks like a timeout for me, at the moment.
So smooth, stable, easy on the head, instantly relaxing, but contains just enough pointy puns and dorky humor to function as hater repelent
I wish my desktop environment looked like this
An operating system running on an operating system to view a mockup of an operating system
Really cool. Great idea
all great while there is hype. once the initial hype fades, so will the conversion rates.
so immersive i actually hit ctrl+w and closed the whole tab.
this is one one of the most unique web design i have come across
arrgggh, my affordances!!!
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.
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.
ok the https://posthog.com/sparks-joy/dictator-or-tech-bro was pretty funny :-D
must be new because few months back, it looks like every SaaS tool in existance
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?)
dream for a front end dev
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!
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.
i hope this doesn't become a trend.
do not do this. ever. it is NOT cool or nice in any way AND i cant scroll using keyboard arrows. meh
This is satire, right?
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.
[dead]
TLDR: It looks like an operating system so it can get viral, like get an article on HN and so on.
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