It's not a "recreation of Windows XP that runs in the browser" but more like "JavaScript application that looks like Windows XP", before anyone becomes disappointed.

Sadly, it doesn't even get the iconic three icons right in the application bars (https://i.imgur.com/agDlohB.png)

And internet explorer seems to work without breaking anything, contrary to the iconic windows xp experience.

IE renders fine because they likely just skinned a real iframe/webview, not shimmed Trident quirks. Real XP IE would've choked on half these CSS animations, missing ActiveX prompts, no crash-on-tab-count-3 bug either.

Also such applications have existed for some time and is nothing novel, likely in the training data.

Hah, just like LLM gives you a simulation of something understanding and being intelligent, this is something that appears to be an operating system, but is just the parts you interact with and not much underneath.

Fake it till you make it, now with a taskbar.

Clickbait marketing is infuriating.

Technically it's not even really "looks like XP" so much as themed CSS over a generic desktop metaphor, IIRC most of these demos reuse the same open source JS-OS shells. Still, the taskbar icon mixup is a good catch.

The "internet explorer" browser-in-browser on the website somewhat works, but it is connecting to websites from an Alibaba cloud datacenter in China, user-agent claims to be an Apple computer and it is using many different exit ip addresses.

Google, gmail, youtube, reddit, yahoo, archive.org etc don't work because they are blocked in China.

It appears that this orange hnn website does not work in China either.

Some websites are 403 forbidden as they seem to be blocking the exit ip addresses.

If you play with this, it may help the enter URLs including the https:// as it does not seem to always properly handle a website upgrading http to https. It may not update the address bar if you get redirected.

> It appears that this orange hnn website does not work in China either.

YC website works though. https://ycombinator.com

To get to HN I used a known HN proxy, and I was able to see the frontpage. Clicking on links caused error with 'Unknown'. I didn't try to troubleshoot it any further.

You can put the app url in the browser and it will recursively open itself. I got two deep before I got scared.

Reminds me of what Fabrice bellard did a few years ago, Linux and windows in JavaScript. https://bellard.org/jslinux/

Or this https://github.com/copy/v86

Except jslinux running actual thing.

Looks neat (and despite trying to simulate a WinXP-like UI it relies enough on the native web stuff that Firefox can translate the Chinese to English without breaking much) but some more information would be great: how was it made? E.g. was it just some one-shot "make me a website that looks and functions like WinXP?" or was there more to it?

The link at the bottom right does mention that it was "user edited" but that could be some generic message and clicking on the "Kimi Agent" seems to just put me in an empty chatbot.

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.

People have been making these with AI for at least a year now. This a very underwhelming show off.

This is how I started web dev 20 years ago :) Building a Windows XP “clone” portal for my PSP.

expected a wasm build of windows xp, instead I got powershell installed on windows xp.

The first thing I did was make it load itself inside it's built-in "Internet Explorer". Then I did that in the child copy. Then I did that in the grand-child copy.. Then I got bored.

I wonder if it's turtles all the way down?

I'm surprised it doesn't use proper HTML by default. I wasn't able to tab focus on the Administrator button on the login screen, and it turns out it's because the entire UI is div spam.

Interesting how it is all in mandarin. What I mean by this, is that it was prompted in mandarin to start with.

I wonder if the result would be better or worse if prompted exactly the same in English.

Kimi K3 also built Mac OS 27 in a browser. https://macos27.kimi.page/

That is Kimi team that developed it using Kimi K3. A Kimi engineer said he was surprised seeing everyone suddenly using Windows XP.

the PowerShell freezing after one command is the most authentic part of the simulation

The "power shell" can only run a single command and then stuck.

I tried to access the linked website, but it didn't open.

this link works for me: https://windows-xp.kimi.site/

yeah this is a really bad title for this.

literally just a visual representation of XP (with the stolen audio). Not bad, but also doesn't really do anything.

minesweeper works seemingly until you find some number that don't sum up...

nah poor attempt, I could've prompted a much much better version.

Is this why Cursor is running a “Make me a Mac OS in the browser” ad?

What an alarmingly pathetic place we have reached.

Just yet another (not very well done) XP lookalike SPA...

Since Microsoft has become a proponent for open source and models, a truly impressive demo would now be to use Kimi K3 to reverse the real XP binaries and turn them back into readable and copyright-free source code.

This isn't remotely what you think it is and it is just a Window XP lookalike.

Flagged.

UI clone easy part. Question: how much state actually persists — file writes, settings, "installed" apps? If it's all reset on refresh, calling it an OS feels generous, more like a themed demo.