Windows

Two people rebuilt a Windows desktop in a browser and put the source out. Both are built here and served from here, and neither reaches anything but this site.

Windows must be played in fullscreen

It takes the whole screen. Escape gives it back.

Windows 11 is win11React by blueedgetechno and contributors, CC0 1.0. Windows XP is winXP by ShizukuIchi, MIT. Neither asks to be credited on the page. This is here because they should be.

What was changed to host them

Both projects fetch things while you use them. Between them they wanted Google Fonts, Google Analytics, a Discord chat widget, a wallpaper from imgur, album art and audio from a streaming CDN, a GitHub star button, a store catalogue from GitHub, news photographs from a dozen papers, and frames pointed at Google, Bing, YouTube and jspaint. Every one of those tells somebody else you are here.

tools/fetch-windows.mjs pins each repository at a commit, patches it, builds it and checks every shipped file by hash. Three windows were rewired rather than switched off:

  • The browser opens this site's own pages and says so when you type anything else.
  • The store sells this site's games. Install one and it opens in a window on the desktop.
  • The music plays the jukebox: the same open-licensed tracks as the jukebox page, off this server.

The XP wallpaper is drawn rather than fetched. Every recreation links to Microsoft's photograph of a hill, which is not ours to serve, so there is a different hill.

Four smaller things follow from this being our copy rather than theirs. XP boots to an empty desktop instead of four windows already open. The account is called sayer and its picture is this site's own mark. The About window no longer opens itself over the desktop the first time you arrive. And it runs fullscreen only, because a desktop in a box two thirds of the way down a page is a picture of a desktop.

A third recreation, win11-svelte, was built and left out. The two things it had that the React one does not are a VS Code window that frames StackBlitz and a browser that frames any address you type. Both had to go, and what remained was a smaller copy of a desktop already here.