Firefox in WebAssembly: Running a Browser Inside a Browser
Anthropic
Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly, enabling the browser to run inside another browser. The project cost an estimated $25,000 in API tokens but used a subscription plan to reduce actual spending. Traffic is proxied through Puter's server via WebSocket, with claims of end-to-end encryption.
Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly, allowing the entire browser to run inside another browser like Chrome. The project leveraged Firefox/Gecko due to its strong single-process support and used approximately $25,000 worth of Claude Opus and Fable tokens, though a Claude Max subscription plan reduced actual costs. The demo routes all network traffic through Puter's server using the Wisp protocol over WebSocket, as browser code cannot open arbitrary connections. The team had to scale servers to handle traffic surges from Hacker News. Puter claims end-to-end encryption, verified by inspecting WebSocket messages: traffic to HTTPS sites was encrypted, while HTTP was cleartext. The firefox-wasm repository is available, and a similar project called WebkitWasm exists but lacks an online demo.
- Сокращения
- WebAssembly = WebAssembly
- Wasm = WebAssembly
- WebSocket = WebSocket
- HTTPS = Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
- HTTP = Hypertext Transfer Protocol
Source: Simon Willison —
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