[Klaster_1]

I think it would be really cool to have a Windows 98 running in browser and an agent to proxy all interaction to real desktop and web:

* It proxies web sites and optinally modifies them to look era-appropriate.

* It can generate missing native apps as shims to apps on your host or web sites. Like, cmd that's actually a pwsh. Or VSCode that looks like Borland C++ Builder.

* Streaming media like Bandcamp or Spotify inside a real WinAmp 2.x.

[keepamovin]

Ha! That's a cool idea. Regarding proxying web sites: that is essentially what this is, but the agent is a "browser proxy" so the web requests go through a browser and the rendering happens on the browser in the server it's on.

BrowserBox actually has a crazy win9x compatibility mode that opens an IE6 compatible client. The issue with native Win 98 browsers is not so much the web content support (which is, admittedly, very basic), it's the lack of modern cipher suites in HTTPS, so an actual proxy would need serve everything HTTP.

For "era-appropriateness" you could add a Chrome extension to BrowserBox that gracefully downgraded all pages to look antique but doing so in a way that can interface with DOM and JS directly - a fine-grained level of control is where browser-based approaches have advantages over rewriting-proxies.

In the past I experimented with running Electron apps heedlessly on servers and have BrowserBox connect to the apps so you could stream these apps. However it was limited to Electron (or other browser-as-render-engine type GUI apps). It was tricky tho due to Electron quirks and never that compelling for me.