It only takes about 10 minutes to step two decades into the past, at a time when music was MIDIs and BMPs where images. Windows 95 has been necro'd, once again, and you can now run in on Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
It comes with all the works: card games without ads, Internet Explorer 1.0, 1995's version of Paint, those classic Windows icons, the first-generation taskbar, the grey embodiment of the Start menu and more.
Getting started is easy. Simply visit the homepage for the browser version of Windows 95 and click "Start Windows 95."
Be warned: it takes roughly ten minutes for the Windows 95 port to load into a browser. After the wait time is over, revelers will be treated to this nostalgic tune – now all that's missing is an AOL disk with 500 free hours.
Leveraging Emscripten and DOSBox, the browser-based version of the operating system was built by student Andrea Faulds, who was born a year before Windows 95. Faulds created a disk image of a Windows 95 CD-ROM, the thing that paved the way for Blu-Rays and DVDs.
"You can fiddle around and have a bit of nostalgia or, if you are one of the newer generations, a learning experience, but anything you do won't be saved – it's entirely ephemeral," Faulds says.
The emulator does not run natively and because the OS disk image is based in a temporary filesystem, it bears no saving capabilities. Changes will be dropped when one navigates away from the page.
While some programs will crash before they'll load, the browser port of Windows 95 is relatively sound. In addition, it requires no plug-ins to function.
"In some cases, Em-DOSBox will abort when the emulator is taking too long, to avoid freezing the browser," Faulds says. "There's not much that can be done about this, unfortunately. Even with a higher timeout, you still see this message and have it abort on you when trying to do certain things (open Internet Explorer, for instance)."
At the moment, Faulds is working on fixes for the crashes, so those who want to do go beyond the tour of the revived relic can have something to look forward to.
