The Chonkerton

Show HN: Firefox in WebAssembly

dev_tools

Hacker News is reporting on a remarkable achievement in browser engineering: Puter has successfully compiled the entire Firefox browser—Gecko, the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, and all UI components—to WebAssembly, so it runs entirely inside another browser. The team used WISP, a protocol that tunnels TCP over WebSockets, to handle network traffic with end-to-end encryption. What makes the project particularly clever is a custom WebAssembly-to-JavaScript JIT compiler they built to speed up site rendering. The entire port consumed over twenty-five thousand Anthropic tokens for debugging and JIT research. While they're framing it as a fun experiment to push WebAssembly's boundaries, they've also released a lighter alternative, browser.js, for more practical browser-in-browser use.

Source: https://developer.puter.com/labs/firefox-wasm/

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