Someone turned Windows 95 into a standalone app you can run, and it’s just as good (and bad) as you imagine

So, Discord is an Electron-based app, and someone ported it to Windows 95 just because they could. Well what if I told you that someone ported Windows 95 to Electron, so that you can download and run it as a standalone app? It’s every bit as cursed as you may imagine, but it’s also a pretty incredible technological feat, too.

Ported by Felix Rieseberg a couple of years ago, this is a complete Windows 95 install inside of an Electron app running through JavaScript. It uses v86 to emulate an x86-compatible CPU and hardware, which then converts machine code to WebAssembly for execution in a browser. While that sounds absolutely bonkers (and I assure you, it is), the result is that you get a complete version of Windows 95 running in Electron as a standalone app.

Windows 95 in Electron is surprisingly usable

Even if you shouldn’t actually use it

While you wouldn’t expect it to be the case, this applications work surprisingly well. There aren’t really any hitches or problems, and it just works. Yeah Windows 95 is nothing short of an archaic operating system these days, but there are still some interesting things you can play around with here.

Windows 95 was introduced many features that became a staple of the modern operating system, with features that we still use to this day in Windows 11 that harken back to their introduction in Windows 95. Windows 95 saw the debut of the Start menu and the taskbar, two features that have changed significantly but are still used to this day. What’s more, the entire concept of the desktop as we know it was introduced here, as Windows 95 also added the ability to have links to apps on the main screen.

It also saw the introduction of the File Explorer, the Control Panel, AutoRun, and even Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 1.0 wasn’t there at the beginning (it was part of the add-on pack), though it later came bundled in an updated Microsoft called “Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1”, which saw it updated to Internet Explorer 2.0. It was also still based on Spyglass Mosaic at the time. Later, with OEM Service Release 2, Internet Explorer 3.0 became its own thing entirely, becoming the most popular browser in the world at the time.

All of these features are present in this Electron port of Windows 95. If you’ve never used it or don’t really know much about it, then this is a great way to get acquainted and step into the early days of modern computing.

How to run Windows 95 in Electron on your PC

Download and run

Rieseberg has built downloadable executables for this application Windows, Windows on Arm, Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and for Linux. You simply download and run it, and there’s no additional setup required. When you first launch it, you’ll be faced with a few options. You can modify the C drive, go to settings, or start Windows 95. Selecting to modify the drive will mount it as a drive that you can change files in, which is how you can copy files to your machine to launch them.

For example, Rieseberg mentions that you can use this to play DOOM, and to make sure you set a resolution of 640×480 at 256 colors for DOS games before launching them. Of course, you’re better off just virtualizing those games properly, but there’s a certain novelty in using Windows 95 authentically to play those games, especially when it’s even crazier that it’s running with JavaScript.

While Windows 95 isn’t a viable operating system these days, it’s a fun step into the past to see what a modern operating system looked like thirty years ago.