Who would have thought in 1995 that one day Windows 95 will be running like an application within other operating systems like Windows 10? But it has happened – now you can double-click on windows95.exe to launch it and run it within Windows 10. It is designed using the Electron framework (that makes use of Javascript, HTML, CSS and the Chromium browser) which basically means that you are running Windows 95 inside the Chromium browser.
In fact, being an Electron application, it also runs on Linux and Mac OS. Separate downloads are available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS. There are two formats of downloads – portable and installable. For the portable version, you can just extract the contents to a folder and just double-click on windows95.exe to start Windows 95. You are shown various options like resetting machine, insert floppy disk, discard state and reboot the machine. It automatically captures your mouse and keyboard but you can press the Escape key to release it.
The Windows 95 used in this app is the Windows 95 OSR 2 version. It comes with Internet Explorer 3.0, but the app does not provide any network access so you cannot really use the browser. You can switch to full-screen mode by pressing F11, but unlike VirtualBox or VMPlayer it does not auto-scale to your screen resolution. Besides it does not make use of Hyper-V technology making Windows 95 not very responsive. If you have Windows 95 ISO or any other Windows 95 installation media, then you can use VirtualBox to have a much better experience using the operating system from the bygone times.
Of course, nobody is going to use Windows 95 for anything serious today. But this little app could be useful for the younger generations to have a brief look at the operating system that their ancestors used almost quarter of a century ago.
You can download the Windows 95 Electron app from https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95/releases.