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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, it doesn't even get the iconic three icons right in the application bars (https://i.imgur.com/agDlohB.png)
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.
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.
I wonder if it's turtles all the way down?
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.
Or this https://github.com/copy/v86
What an alarmingly pathetic place we have reached.
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.
Flagged.