alt Hacker NewsWhy create a website that looks like an operating system? A lot of people do it. Is it as a demo? There's some art projects that do it.
Why create a website that looks like an operating system? A lot of people do it. Is it as a demo? There's some art projects that do it.
There was a bit of a fad for stuff like this, maybe 20 years or so ago, as soon as browser JS/CSS support started getting good enough to support it.
All of a sudden, we had the ability to build complex interactive UIs in a web page, and we had to figure out how to use that ability. So naturally a bunch of people had the idea of just cloning existing desktop apps and styles, up to and including the full Windows desktop.
There were a few people who thought cloning the desktop UX into a browser would be "the future of computing" (see e.g. YouOS, a YC startup: https://www.benh.org/techblog/2006/07/youos-a-new-kind-of-co...) but I think most people just saw it as a fun way to show off your web dev skills.
I think it persists out of nostalgia, not just for the operating systems themselves, but for a particular era of web development history. And you still see this kind of UI occasionally in real products, e.g. Synology DSM.