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Hacker95.css – Make Hacker News look like Windows 95
- chowderman 6y agoThis is a CSS stylesheet to theme your Hacker News in a Windows95/98 style
- bobbyz 6y agoYou have installation instructions for Firefox, which has like a 5% market share, yet you don't have instructions for chrome. That cracked me up
- DiabloD3 6y agoI think Chrome killed off that one popular extension for CSS insertion?
- bobbyz 6y agoReminds me of those times when I built a website that doesn't have a functioning mobile view, put it on reddit, and it turns out that everybody is mobile
- salusinarduis 6y agoMaybe 5% total user share. Certainly the tech oriented crowd uses Firefox at a greater rate.
- bobbyz 6y agoMy analytics also indicate 5%. Just how tech oriented are the folks you have in mind?
- userbinator 6y agoChrome removed that functionality a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1ymfgw/user_stylesheet_customcss_support_removed_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1ymfgw/user_stylesh... (The comment there that removing this "is going to help increase speed significantly in the future" is pure BS. If anything, user stylesheet functionality was handled in native code --- just adding another CSS to the page --- which makes it far more efficient than going through the whole JS/extensions route.) Ironically, IE11 is the last MS browser to support user stylesheets (Tools->Options->Accessibility) but Edge doesn't. Even in Firefox, the fact that it's named "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" is ominous. The Internet is becoming more and more user-hostile, and it's not just websites who are responsible.
- myfonj 6y agohttps://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=347016 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=347016 Issue asking for reintroducing native user style sheets in Chrome, with precise argumentation and long discussion. Does not seem likely to be heard, but symbolical starring doesn't hurt…
- encom 6y ago>The Internet is becoming more and more user-hostile, and it's not just websites who are responsible. That's because the webbrowser has been pushed away from hyperlinked documents viewer, to essentially a virtual machine running untrusted code from anywhere. It's probably Googles fault somehow. They seem determined to ruin everything.
- bobbyz 6y agoIt would be helpful if this could have been indicated
- 627467 6y agoSurely one of those other 95% of users can contribute with instructions that apply them.
- browsergap 6y agoYou could probably make a bookmarklet to pull the stylesheet from github and add it to the document stylesheets. Maybe using the new Stylesheet constructor?
- red2awn 6y agoThere are a few chrome extensions for adding custom CSS. Try "stylebot" or "User javascript and css", they both works ok.
- anticensor 6y agoUse Stylish/Stylus.
- tomc1985 6y agoYou made fun of Firefox. That cracked me up
- bobbyz 6y agoHeres a fun Firefox fact. Firefox handles audio/media files differently than chrome. Since it has a small market share, it becomes a rather annoying lose-lose: either spend a bunch of time to support Firefox for the ~20 people that will access your site using Firefox, or you don't support Firefox.
- tomc1985 6y agoIt's a shame that laziness is more important than interoperability. Part of the life of frontend or webdev is dealing with compatilibity issues, and it has been that way since forever. If you got into this biz thinking you could do that work and avoid those problems you thought wrong.
- bobbyz 6y agoLaziness? Don't you mean unpractical and financially unviable? If I support Firefox do I support Edge, Opera, Android Webview, UC Browser? Explain how pragmatic prioritization can constitute as laziness.
- cryptoz 6y agoIt wouldn't be HN if I didn't say that I think Windows 95 had solid blue title bars rather than the 98/NT gradient. But yeah this is cool :)
- asveikau 6y agoNT didn't have the gradients either. 2000 did.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoWin98 did though.
- asveikau 6y agoThat's correct. 98 was the first release to have it, chronologically speaking. 2000 was the first NT based Windows to have it. So 98/NT didn't make sense to me. NT4, the last release to use the name NT, had a very Win95-like appearance. I also remember NT 3.51 (and I guess there were other 3.x) that had a very Win3.1-like UI despite being 32 bit.
- cryptoz 6y agoYeah you got me. Fair enough. Windows 2000 was amazing and just my favorite OS. Saying that as a linux user.
- coronadisaster 6y agoWin2000 was the most perfect and least buggy Windows version of all time.
- asveikau 6y agoIt didn't seem buggy at the time but you wouldn't want it on the public internet with all its security bugs. It would be nice if Microsoft just backported security improvements and other kernel type stuff without messing with UI.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoThemes... Sitting in these Zoom meetings, that's about all I think about. Three Participants: https://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/placed_wide/nprshared/201805/582776998.png https://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/pl... Four Participants: https://www.feelingthevibe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NUP_186210_11411-1024x684.jpg https://www.feelingthevibe.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NU... Eight: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/thebradybunch/images/3/3a/The_Brady_Bunch_Movie_opening_screenshot.png/revision/latest?cb=20140909185228 https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/thebradybunch/images/3/3... Nine: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/a1/b6/0ba1b63cf281efbe48eb455025970ee4.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0b/a1/b6/0ba1b63cf281efbe48eb... Silly. Sorry.
- crazygringo 6y agoTo do this for Chrome, all you need is the popular Stylus extension [1] and OP can upload it to userstyles.org [2] for even more convenience (don't need to download a CSS file). Also to be even more Windows 95-ey I recommend making the top links (new, past, etc.) look like a tab bar! (I really like the way the footer links look like a status bar.) [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpeebahjckkjfobafhncgmne https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe... [2] https://userstyles.org/ https://userstyles.org/
- SlackingOff123 6y agoStylus is available for Firefox as well [1] and it makes it a lot easier to install custom styles. [1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us
- spuz 6y agoIf you don't want to install a 3rd party extension (maybe it seems like too much of a risk for such a frivolous purpose), then you can make your own. Just download hacker95.css and create a file called manifest.json in the same directory with these contents: { "name": "Hacker News 95 Extension", "version": "1.0", "description": "Hacker News 95 Extension", "permissions": ["activeTab"], "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["https://new.ycombinator.com/*" https://new.ycombinator.com/*"], "css": ["hacker95.css"] } ], "manifest_version": 2 } Then in your Chrome Extensions settings, find the option to "Load unpacked extension" and point it to your directory.
- spuz 6y agoSo my anti-procrastination setting kicked in just as I made this comment and now I can neither edit it or delete it. I made the same comment again with proper formatting of the json file.
- myfonj 6y agoWord of warning about userstyles.org: this site (as well as original "Stylish" browser extension) is in hands of some kind of PR agency that made some very questionable changes in the past and neglects this product now. As an alternative you can post (or link) your style at https://greasyfork.org/ https://greasyfork.org/ which newly supports Stylus user.css style format or even self-host the file somewhere (github perhaps). Seems PR is opened already: https://github.com/chowderman/Hacker95/issues/2 https://github.com/chowderman/Hacker95/issues/2)
- anyfoo 6y agoI’ve added a user style sheet in Safari somewhat recently to fix an annoying video player. I think it was easy to find in Settings. Can someone check if that works? Not near my laptop right now, and I use a 3rd party app on the phone.
- kalleboo 6y agoIt's easy to add as a user style sheet in Safari (Preferences > Advanced > Stylesheet), but there's no CSS selector to limit it to a domain, so it makes the whole web turn Windows 95 style, not just Hacker News.
- pmachinery 6y agoI love retro-ish design but it's often not practical or pleasing, past the initial novelty, and a reminder of why things change. This looks excellent (from the screenshot). It reminds me of a mid-late 90s Windows Usenet newsreader, which I wouldn't mind if every web forum looked like.
- rob74 6y agoLooks nice, but the shadows on the buttons are wrong: the top and left edges should be white, the other two black. This way, the buttons look more like elements of a status bar, those had the borders reversed to produce an "inset" effect (like in this screenshot: http://173.255.209.242/chhtml/toolkit/demos/Windows/gifs/gadgets1.gif http://173.255.209.242/chhtml/toolkit/demos/Windows/gifs/gad...)
- hunter2_ 6y agoI was always slightly perplexed as to how that difference in orientation of colors leads to the out/in effect. I guess it's not so much the left/right but the top/bottom that really achieves this phenomenon, given how most daily light sources come from above (sun, ceiling fixtures, floor lamps) and there are relatively few instances of uplighting (landscaping, ...) around us.
- dspillett 6y agoIt is an artefact of how we scan things visually. Most of us read top-to-bottom/left-to-right and habitually look at pictures with that bias, so when the brain fills in the missing height detail for a 2D display using the light/shadow indicators it defaults to assuming the light source is in the top left. The affect designed for us doesn't work as well for those whose primary written forms follow a right-to-left structure. Obviously, as you mention, the light source being assumed to be high comes from a much older source as our main natural lights are up high.
- sjwright 6y agoThe up–down orientation unquestionably comes from the near-universality of light sources being above you. You'll notice that intense up-lighting is almost never found in the natural or artificial world. (It's true that upwards-firing lights are often used in interior decoration, but these are almost always to illuminate walls and ceilings above us which then bounce light down to the contents of a room. Also, some techniques in photographic and studio lighting do use some up-firing lights, but these act as shadow fill, never as the primary light source—except when an unusual look is intended.) To the extent that we expect a certain left–right orientation, this will almost certainly be predominantly a matter of consistency with prior graphical user interfaces. The near-universal standard of a top/left lighting metaphor goes at least as far back as the original Apple Lisa/Macintosh which cast its 1-bit, 1 pixel shadows to the bottom/right. The fact that people of near-identical cultures can natively integrate either left-hand driving or right-hand driving suggests to me that there's no inherent reason why it needed to be one way or the other. Had the first interfaces begun with a top/right lighting metaphor, we'd probably be all as native to that as British people are with right-hand-drive vehicles.
- t0astbread 6y agoI also wrote something like this a while ago. I created a GitHub Gist so you can compare: https://gist.github.com/T0astBread/1e04aed3c8e1c3f19d5fc5e5a5602281 https://gist.github.com/T0astBread/1e04aed3c8e1c3f19d5fc5e5a... Someone mentioned how much they miss beveled buttons and how every button would be cooler with a beveled edge so I thought "well how about making everything beveled then", then I got a little carried away... Anyways, mine is utterly impractical. I don't know how but I managed to make the site sluggish with just CSS. It's probably also broken in Chrome. This looks extremely cool in comparison!
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoI already have lots of custom CSS for HN though :D
- badrabbit 6y agoSir/Madam, you are a hero!
- allie1 6y agoIs it rigged to give you the good ole' blue screen of death every 10th click or so?
- oleganza 6y agoBecause real Windows 95/98 had BSOD every 10th click or so and people could not get work done at all. Funnily, in last few months on macOS Catalina i've got more kernel panics than in prior 13 years on Mac and 8 years of Windows combined.
- SllX 6y agoI know this is unsolicited and I apologize for that, but check your Console logs immediately after you boot back up if you haven't already, there might be a hardware issue, and you ought to be able to get a good idea of what's going on by seeing what kext is affecting it. My current and previous laptop have been fine, but I used to have issues all the time on a much older laptop, and the issue back then, I forgot exactly which piece of hardware it was, but there was a bug in one of the drivers that was patched in an update, I think it was 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 that had the issue, a known issue at the Apple Store; but they couldn't do anything about it from behind the Genius Bar. Generally if you're getting kernel panics though, there's either something wrong with a piece of hardware or with the driver for it, although it could be any kind of kext causing the issue if you have any 3rd party kexts installed.
- josefrichter 6y agoHacker News already does look like made in Win95 age.
- aspenmayer 6y agoI just let out a big oof IRL. Not sure if that it’s a bad thing or aesthetic though, to be honest.
- pedrocx486 6y agoFunction over form. I don't think this is a bad thing, HN doesn't need to be any more advanced, it does its job really well as is.
- josefrichter 6y agoExactly. It works. Takes balls not to touch things that work.
- a_imho 6y agoBrowsing pages of Who is Hiring when the comments move to other pages sucks.
- aspenmayer 6y agoAptly put.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoReally? With those little voting arrows?
- wtetzner 6y agoIt would be nice if it supported markdown, though.
- pedrocx486 6y agoIt supports some markdown, but I agree, that and a dark mode (I made a really basic one for the Stylish extension) would be the only things I'd accept as a change. Aside that anything like making the site full of JS for more functions would be a no from me. :-)
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoI had wished that all my life... :D
- paramost 6y agoNow all we need is a good dark mode :)
- Moru 6y agoI'm using darkreader for firefox, works ok. https://darkreader.org/ https://darkreader.org/
- slowwriter 6y agoHonestly my immediate thought was, doesn't it kind of already? Just kidding
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI don't think it's an insult anyway. I like the clean and simple look, and the Windows 95 theme gets a lot right in terms of UI design. Generally high contrast, easy to tell at a glance which widgets are clickable. Hacker95 seems to get the Windows 95 buttons wrong though, showing them as 'sunken', and not giving a clear impression of being clickable.
- slowwriter 6y agoIt's a joky insult. Hacker News and Windows 95 have in common that they look objectively old. But what they also have in common is that they are function over form in an atypically pure sense, especially compared to some modern UI design. Although I prefer a more balanced approach on the spectrum of pure function and pure form, pure function beats pure form any day
- jasoneckert 6y agoI like this, because nostalgia adds fun to news! My personal preference, however, would be to see Hacker News look like IRIX.
- digitalsin 6y agoI love this! Can you do reddit now please? :)
- DonHopkins 6y agoThat makes me feel 25 years younger!
- Sebb767 6y agoGreat project! A screenshot in the README would be awesome, though.
- reggegg 6y agoSeems no one has mentioned it yet but what bothers me about most of these stylesheet hacks is that they never get the font right. Granted I don't know what it would take to make the old font (MS Sans Serif?) browser-compatible, possible copyright issues aside(?)
- bbbobbb 6y agoCheck out this article on this exact topic: https://vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers https://vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers
- userbinator 6y agoGranted I don't know what it would take to make the old font (MS Sans Serif?) browser-compatible, possible copyright issues aside(?) If you're using a system that has the font, all you need to do is specify it by name.
- jrururufuf666 6y agofits nice to my wetransfer alternative http://www.upload95.com http://www.upload95.com
- benedikt 6y agoThe gradient on the titlebar was from windows 98 btw, windows 95 didn't have it. win95: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/eb/Windows_95_at_first_run.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/eb/Windows_95_at... win98: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Sound_Recorder_in_Windows_98.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Sound_Recorde...
- perryizgr8 6y agoI wish win10 had a win95 or win 2000 theme. I really love this aesthetic. I used to use win7 like this too.