Why our website looks like an operating system

90% of non-tech-nerds have this simple of an opinion about it:

1. Retargeting ads are "creepy" because ... "they just are"

2. Retargeting ads either annoy me because I think they're dumb in that particular instance ("I already BOUGHT a phone case last week, it's so dumb that it keeps showing me phone cases all day!") or because they're too good ("I gave in and bought the juicer after I kept seeing those ads all around the web") and I don't like spending money.

The rest of "tracking" they don't even know anything about and can't verifiably point to any harms.

Data brokers acquire data from thousands of different sources - many of which aren't stemming from Internet usage - and most of the browser data relevant here isn't tied to their actual name and permanent identity (and doesn't need to be to serve its purpose which is usually "to show relevant ads" and the more specific case of "to get people to come back and buy things they saw").

Honestly, just like people are annoyed by pushy car salesmen, and being asked for a "tip" at a self-order kiosk counter-service restaurant, they are going to be annoyed about aspects of the commercial Internet, and it doesn't automatically mean that they're being victimized or that they need regulations to try to help.

Oop, there is none.

I will never laud an application that breaks the most basic of keyboard functions. You can design a clever and flashy application with pointer-only UI, but you can't design a good one.

1) url history piles up pretty quickly, going back was irritating, closing a "OS" window should unstack that from browser history

2) more than one way to get to things (ie desktop icon + menu) so I visited certain pages ("About") more than once and felt trapped in a maze of deja-vus.

3) no way to scroll down and get the full glimpse, had to proactively click on words + icon, or menu items, to spot if inside there would be something relevant. Then, once the window opens: tabs, lots of tabs...

4) since the information is not really hierarchical, I can't delve into say Pricing. Got click on all the menu items... "Didn't I visit that before?" - and history kept piling up, so where was I before?

5) In Pricing, I read "Free tier - no support" - of course! - then $0.0001 for pay-for-use for the feature flag (every time the user switches the feature on/off? I don't get it, I'm sorry) ... then another free x pay-as-you-go box. Scroll down, then a huge calculator... . How much does it cost for my second app?

6) Cramped: lots of information in a reduced window - hit maximize every time, lots of borders.

7) Product features are really impressive, but the demo video gave the impression that it's really a busy app, overwhelming at times, with lot's of filtering options that look necessary to get the info out of the tool (great for power users, though!). But then the website is also busy and complex. If we add both up, app and website = high cognitive overload! I think I'll go shopping around first then come back later.

A disaster.

I hope they eat their own dog food. I'm pretty sure they will get lots of bad signals from their website.

Comparing the various nag windows on MacOS and Windows, as much as they are annoying, the MacOS nags look like a 1999 rework of the modals from the 1984 original Mac whereas the web-based ones in Windows are easier on the eyes. I have looked long and hard at x-platform UI frameworks and they are generally pretty awful and with all the affordances the web platform has Electron looks good in comparison both in terms of UX and DX.

My beef is with the tabs-inside-of-windows, windows-inside-of-windows and the frequent need to have a large number of ‘items’ open and wanting some synoptic view of all the items open in all the applications on all of the virtual desktops a modern machine can have. I try pretty hard to keep it organized but if I am listening to music in YouTube it should be trivial to find the browser tab involved to close it and it’s not.

I’m reminded of the multiple document interface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface

Which was big in the Windows 95 era, particularly with Office that now seems largely forgotten. When Netscape 4 hit the streets Netscape changed their home page to use which were like absolute positioned (s) to get an MDI effect like the page that started this discussion. Trouble was it didn’t work and they had to revert it quickly. I told my professor that I thought I wouldn’t understand how web pages worked in six months it was changing so fast but JavaScript supremacy took at least another 12 years even if Microsoft rolled out AJAX circa 1999 it took forever in internet time for people to get the significance.

EDIT: Ok, I take back the "usable" part. This is insanity. I have found links that don't do anything. Some links open in overlay popups (some of which get cut off on mobile), others in new "windows". The X button behaves erratically (or at least not as I would expect), clicking on the page title in the headers sometimes opens menu, sometimes it doesn't. There's a WYSIWYG editor bar at the top of https://posthog.com/changelog/2025 even though I'm not editing anything(?!) and the "undo" button(?) looks like a browser refresh button(?!), though I'll have to admit I initially thought this might be a back button, since there's also that forward button.

Who thought this was a good idea?