Show HN: Browse the (old) web with emulated browsers running in your browser

This is great, thanks for sharing!

The web is amazing in its level of backwards compatibility, in that you can make a website compatible with all of these browsers from the 90s today!

Retro-computing growth is exploding based on what I see here and on Facebook, and it could be the key to saving the Web's openness.

I'm working on a project which allows for easily building hybrid static-dynamic sites compatible with Mosaic+, and I am grateful to others working to preserve this technology.

Thanks again!

I'm excited to share the latest update from Webrecorder project, the release of a new OldWeb.today (https://oldweb.today), now running emulated browsers using JS/WASM entirely in your browser!

This is an update to the previous version (discussed 5 years ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653033)

This builds on much previous work, including two excellent emulators, v86 (previously discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203) and Basilisk in JS (mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632843) running in the browser. These were modified to support a browser-based network stack, an Emscripten build of picotcp created by the bwFla Emulation-as-a-Service team (https://gitlab.com/emulation-as-a-service/picotcp.js)

The IE and Netscape browsers support older versions of Flash and Java. For good measure, there is also an option to run just the Ruffle emulator (discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115) for Flash-only emulation in your current browser.

The system can browse live web pages as well as archived pages from Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. OldWeb.today can be deployed as a static site and connected to other archives as well. (Only a server-side CORS proxy is necessary, for connecting to external websites or archives)

More details on how it works at: https://github.com/oldweb-today/oldweb-today

Blog post: https://webrecorder.net/2020/12/23/new-oldweb-today.html