Boxedwine can emulate Windows applications in web browsers

guest · Oct 3, 2021

Boxedwine can emulate Windows applications in web browsers
October 3, 2021
https://www.xda-developers.com/boxedwine-emulate-windows-applications-web-browsers/

The Wine project has been around for years, allowing people to run (some) Windows applications on Linux, macOS, and BSD operating systems. It’s one of the best examples of open-source software development, but Wine can’t quite run on everything. Boxedwine, a newer project that builds upon Wine, aims to fix that — it can run on more operating systems, and even web browsers.

However, Boxedwine is an emulator. It uses an unmodified 32-bit version of Wine that runs in an emulated Linux environment. Boxedwine is written in C++ with an SDL interface, so it’s even more cross-platform than Wine.
Mac and Linux are supported, same as regular Wine, but you can also run it on Windows.
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Boxedwine can also run inside of modern web browsers, thanks to WebAssembly and Emscripten. You can try out some demo Windows applications and games at boxedwine.org/demo, including Age of Empires (1997), AbiWord, and 3-D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night. Boxedwine is already at around 25% of the speed of the host system (according to the developer), and there’s likely a further decrease from running inside a browser, but basic applications like AbiWord are usable with Chromium on my PC with a Ryzen 5 1500 processor.

The browser is running an entire Linux kernel, an unmodified copy of Wine, and the Windows application all on top — with no video streaming from a server involved.
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Here’s hoping the project continues to improve. If you want to give the desktop version a shot, pre-compiled Windows versions are available from the Boxedwine website.
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NormanF · Oct 3, 2021

WINE will only become useful when Microsoft makes public the proprietary code underlying Windows. Until that happens, it will remain a hit and miss proposition to run Windows programs in Linux and Mac.

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