To make things even more strange
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 6:12 am
Here’s the interesting thing: The emulated historic machine would continue to run. In other words, we had a still-functioning, emulated broken machine, as if you’d brought home a damaged 486 PC in 1993 from the store and realized it was made of cheaper parts than you expected.
this was only happening to emulated DOS programs in the Google Chrome browser. And only Google Chrome version 51.x. And only in the 32-bit version of Google Chrome 51.x. (A huge thanks to the growing number of people who helped this get tracked down.)
This is what people should have been seeing, which I think we can agree looks much better:
screenshot_00
The short-term fix is to run Firefox instead of telemarketing data Chrome for the moment if you see a crash, but that’s not really a “fix” per se – Chrome has had the bug reported to them and they’re hard at work on it (and working on a bug can be a lot of work). And there’s no guarantee an update to Firefox (or the Edge Browser, or any of the other browsers working today) won’t cause other weird problems going down the line.
All this, then, can remind people how strange, how interlocking, and even fragile our web ecosystem is at the moment. The “Web” is a web of standards dancing with improvisations, hacks, best guesses and a radically moving target of what needs to be obeyed and discarded. With the automatic downloading of new versions of browsers from a small set of makers, we gain security, but more-obscure bugs might change the functioning of a website overnight. We make sure the newest standards are followed as quickly as possible, but we also wake up to finding out an old trusted standard was deemed no longer worthy of use.
Old standards or features (background music in web pages, the gopher protocol, Flash) give way to new plugins or processes, and the web must be expected, as best it can, to deal with the new and the old and fail gracefully when it can’t quite do it. As part of the work of the Decentralized Web Summit was to bring forward the strengths of this world (collaboration, transparency, reproducibility) while pulling back from the weaknesses of this shifting landscape (centralization, gatekeeping, utter and total loss of history), it’s obvious a lot of people recognize this is an ongoing situation, needing vigilance and hard work.
In the meantime, we’ll do our best to keep on how the latest and greatest browsers deal with the still-fresh world of in-browser emulation, and try to emulate hardware that did come working from the factory.
this was only happening to emulated DOS programs in the Google Chrome browser. And only Google Chrome version 51.x. And only in the 32-bit version of Google Chrome 51.x. (A huge thanks to the growing number of people who helped this get tracked down.)
This is what people should have been seeing, which I think we can agree looks much better:
screenshot_00
The short-term fix is to run Firefox instead of telemarketing data Chrome for the moment if you see a crash, but that’s not really a “fix” per se – Chrome has had the bug reported to them and they’re hard at work on it (and working on a bug can be a lot of work). And there’s no guarantee an update to Firefox (or the Edge Browser, or any of the other browsers working today) won’t cause other weird problems going down the line.
All this, then, can remind people how strange, how interlocking, and even fragile our web ecosystem is at the moment. The “Web” is a web of standards dancing with improvisations, hacks, best guesses and a radically moving target of what needs to be obeyed and discarded. With the automatic downloading of new versions of browsers from a small set of makers, we gain security, but more-obscure bugs might change the functioning of a website overnight. We make sure the newest standards are followed as quickly as possible, but we also wake up to finding out an old trusted standard was deemed no longer worthy of use.
Old standards or features (background music in web pages, the gopher protocol, Flash) give way to new plugins or processes, and the web must be expected, as best it can, to deal with the new and the old and fail gracefully when it can’t quite do it. As part of the work of the Decentralized Web Summit was to bring forward the strengths of this world (collaboration, transparency, reproducibility) while pulling back from the weaknesses of this shifting landscape (centralization, gatekeeping, utter and total loss of history), it’s obvious a lot of people recognize this is an ongoing situation, needing vigilance and hard work.
In the meantime, we’ll do our best to keep on how the latest and greatest browsers deal with the still-fresh world of in-browser emulation, and try to emulate hardware that did come working from the factory.