Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web
34 comments
·July 27, 2025cosmic_cheese
jszymborski
I used Windows 7 in my formative years, so I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for it.
That said, I really do think the Windows NT era had the best UI in terms of brute usability.
Again, I love Aero's faux glass, cyan highlights, high gloss, etc... but it is indeed a lot of noise and I think it's a bit distracting.
cosmic_cheese
The 95-like look (of which I think the 2K variant is best) does have a bit of an edge in terms of usability, but it also looks considerably more dated. A similarly legible theme from that era that I think time has been more kind to is Platinum, the theme used by Mac OS from System 7.6.1 through Mac OS 9.2.1.
Any new UI design looking to incorporate Aero’s good bits would be smart to tone the look down a little.
johnebgd
MacOS X 10.4 was peak Apple UI design from my personal experience. That metal look was pretty…
Android, Windows and iOS all look similar now… macOS is shifting that way…
Bring back skeuomorphic design…
shortrounddev2
Who do I assign blame to for horrible modern UX design? Is it the hubris of designers who believe that the constraints of the human body should be felled by minimalist purity? Is it bean counters who weaponize industrial psychology to create flat, boring UI to increase engagement/addiction? Is it the average technology user who has simply become too stupid to use anything other than a touchscreen? Why does it seem like everyone I've talked to about this agrees that basically all modern technology products are boring and uninspired compared to just 15 years ago, but it also seems like we keep building (and buying) boring, uninspired technology products?
cosmic_cheese
I’m a dev not a designer, but I’d personally point to a few things:
- An influx of print/commercial/etc designers into UI design, who lack the full suite of knowledge and skills to design usable UI, crowding out the UI designer old guard
- The likes of Dribbble and other social media kicking off self reinforcing minimalism trends within the field
- The rise of “UI as branding” which places brand identity far above practical usability in terms of priorities
There are other factors like indie devs not wanting to hire a designer for their projects and just phoning that part in (which flat is conducive to), but they don’t have nearly as much sway on industry trends at large.
flykespice
I concur, I think the successor flat design trend has nailed on reducing the styling visual clutter and keeping the user just focused on the "substance" from the app UI whilst keeping the UI itself minimal with no distractions.
cosmic_cheese
The problem is that minimalism and maximalism in UI design exist on a kind of horseshoe curve. Extremely maximalist UI is indeed distracting, but past a certain point of pruning so is minimalism, just in a different way. Instead of having your eyes drawn away from the content by flashy widgets, you’re poking and swiping to find the function you’re looking for, like someone feeling around trying to find the exit in a pitch dark room.
jmchuster
> 7.css is a CSS framework for building interface components that look like Windows 7. It is built on top of the GUI backbone of XP.css, which is an extension of 98.css.
Just an absolutely lovely line of text.
malikNF
Every time I see something about windows7 coming up, I feel a little sad. 7 imo was the last good windows ms came up with. I remember upgrading to it was something worth bragging to your friends in school. There was so much excitement around it. After 7, something felt, broken, new features felt unnecessary, things got more user hostile, the magic, it was just gone!
benbristow
Did you have a Windows 7 Launch Party?
https://gizmodo.com/this-incredible-windows-7-launch-party-v...
BrenBarn
Yeah. I feel like the main thing was it was the last version that still had essentially user-controlled updates. By default it would auto-update, but you could have it not do that, or have it download the updates but not install them until you decided to, and you could deselect individual updates and just skip them.
I suspect this is linked to its era: it came out on the cusp of the trend of having everything autoupdate on its own initiative. (I just looked it up and Firefox 15 came out around the same time and was the first version to have "silent updates".) This in turn came as some kind of tipping point was reached where it became simpler to assume everyone was always connected to the internet (and have some kind of "emergency mode" for when they weren't) than to assume they weren't (and have some kind of "online mode" for when they were). And that also led to the proliferation of telemetry and other such things that involve using that always-on-ness to talk back to the software company.
I see this as part of a trend away from what I call "bounded transactions" and toward subscription-type models, and I think it's been one of the most corrosive developments in our society. The thing about Win7 was that once you had a computer up and running with it, it was up and running and would continue to be, and you could just kind of leave it like that. You had security issues to worry about, but you still had the option of being the one to worry about them. In the following years, everything began to shift towards the "you own nothing" model where so much of the functionality of "your" hardware and software was actually just a short-term lease with some company on the other end that could decide to rugpull you at their convenience.
wredcoll
Older people feel exactly the same way about windows2000... or sometimes 98... or 3.1...
BrenBarn
I used all of those versions but I'd still agree that Win7 was the last good one. I still love the 95/98 aesthetic the most and it's what I try to replicate with my systems now, but the dropoff after Win7 is still much greater.
saurik
I think the usual adage is that every other version of Windows is pretty good.
leonnatus
more about xp than 2000
bestham
For me more about 2000 than XP. 2000 still felt like a Workstation OS and it was very responsive. XP themeing was the first thing I removed once I could not continue on 2000.
therein
Yeah, most people wouldn't say that about Win2000, but XP, definitely. XP Service Pack 2 was excellent.
dybber
The checkboxes doesn’t look quite right on iOS
joshuaissac
I wonder if this can be integrated with Electron and Tauri to provide native-looking user interfaces.
Combined with a theme-to-CSS convertor, imagine an Electron app looking like a Windows app on Windows, and a GTK app on Linux, while following the colours and styles of the custom theme the user has selected in their OS.
skgough
I don't think you could 100% nail the Win7 glass or Win11 mica material without having transparency effects that have access to the compositor pipeline. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get close enough!
90s_dev
The reason I started hram.dev was so I could have a native platform to port 90s.dev to. I love the idea of having native host for retro GUIs. But I am not a huge fan of html/css/js combo. It feels tacked on because it is. I came up with a relatively novel and I think truly innovative GUI methodology in 90s.dev that I did not know how to explain so I haven't truly shared with people how exciting it potentially is. Tomorrow I plan to put up a github-sponsors link with a few different projects, where for each $50 that I receive for a given project, I will work two hours on that project. This way the community can help sponsor me turning these things into realities.
pknerd
why nobody tries KDE or GNOME?
OsrsNeedsf2P
KDE and GNOME weren't as popular as Windows 7. Unless you mean porting Windows 7 to KDE as a theme?
bilgi42
they also change theming too quickly sometimes. windows 7 is set, it's not going to change, ever
xcrunner529
Super cool. Anyone know if a similar library exists for Aqua?
nosioptar
This is awesome. I love that the readme contains pictures of everything.
kaltsturm
Great work and idea! How can I use it without having tailwindcss changing all css?
gchamonlive
These visual elements have to be protected by intellectual property somehow. Has Microsoft ever legally persecuted these types of projects before? Or projects built upon such libraries?
I'd be wary to build on top of these clones only to receive a cease and desist, but that's a fear of mine, I don't know if it's founded.
poly2it
It can be more difficult to claim copyright over shapes and patterns than you think.
flykespice
And somehow Tetris Company succeeded it..
xyst
I have a gallery of cease and desist orders. I would love to add MSFT to the list.
xyst
Ah yes the days of "aero ui". Sad to hear Apple designers are taking cues from _old_ windows designs now.
Very nice. Does anybody else find it a bit striking how gracefully this look has aged? With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.
Modern UI design could stand to take not just a few pages but the majority of the book from both the Windows 7 variant of Aero and the OS X 10.9 variant of Aqua, in my opinion. Legibility, information density, and communication of interactability and widget function have all been lost as we’ve careened towards egregiously thick padding, low contrast, and low differentiation.