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Not to be confused with ReactOS, the OS that not only recreates the look but also the functionality of Windows NT.
I used this library as part of a major redesign for my personal website ( https://hat.fo ), and thought that others might get a kick out of it. Fun little components library :-)
Just for future reference, Show HNs are for things you've made yourself, so while your website could be a Show HN, this would be a regular submission. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
In contrast, HTML5 has an absolute poverty of UI controls. The web community ended up settling on React + "design systems" to try and patch their way out of this, but because theming and widget toolkits get blended together in this approach the widgets are constantly being reinvented and end up half baked compared to desktop UI frameworks, which separate theming from widget behavior and thus get way more investment in the core feature set.
This shows up in a lot of subtle ways, and a few not so subtle ways. For example there are some controls common in Win95 apps that are conspicuously missing here:
• Virtualized list view with resizable/movable headers. There doesn't seem to be a list view control at all, in fact. The control they call list is actually a menu!
• Yet there's no menu bar, and the menu ("list") doesn't seem to be a real context menu. Right click an item in the tree view and you get the browser context menu, which is useless.
• There's no tree table view.
• The range control doesn't have notches or the ability to see the value you're sliding.
etc. And of course you can forget about all the little features Win95 widgets had like proper keyboard support (try using the up/down arrows in the tree view, it doesn't work).
Now obviously this is just a fun hobby project. It's not meant to be an actual widget toolkit competitive with Windows 95, so the criticism above isn't "real" criticism, it's just a springboard for a bit of technical observation: it's 2023! Why does the web still not have a UI framework competitive with an OS that came out nearly 30 years ago? If you wanted to make a Win95 theme for Qt or JavaFX then it would be quite easy and you would actually be able make apps that were competitive with Win95 apps in terms of UI features. But the React+DOM approach can't manage that because the effort required to flesh out the widgets is split between a thousand design systems. That seems wrong and is part of why web UI feels kinda dumbed down compared to what we once had.
Does anyone have a link to the HIG for Windows 95? I learned a lot from reading the HIG for later versions of Windows, but I don't remember seeing anything for the older versions.
Another great resource to create web experiences that look like old versions of Windows is 98.css by Jordan Scales: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ With it, you don't need to use React to get decent results, see? https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/about.html
I don’t think you need React but this page isn’t demonstrating that you don’t need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice work! The most surprising part for me was that your websites says you are 20 years old – so I gotta ask, what was the motivation? I'm 39, born in 1983, so I have serious nostalgia around Windows 95. I was 12 when it came out, my parents bought a Dell when it was new and those years were very formative for me. I assumed that nostalgia would be the only driver to do this... But you weren't born until ~8 years afte…
Can't speak for them, but I'm 25 and have a massive amount of nostalgia for windows 2000, for the weird reason that the first computer I ever got free-reign over was a give-away machine from the IT department from my mother's job at the time. Maybe around 2007-8? I'd have to bet it's something like that for GP too!
Not to be confused with ReactOS, the OS that not only recreates the look but also the functionality of Windows NT.
I used this library as part of a major redesign for my personal website ( https://hat.fo ), and thought that others might get a kick out of it. Fun little components library :-)
... there's a VM on here?! (Start menu > Programs > Doom Linux) That got a real belly laugh out of me. Looks like https://github.com/copy/v86 ? Awesome work! The whole aesthetic is well done.