Puter has compiled a full Firefox instance into WebAssembly, allowing the browser to execute entirely within another browser window. The demonstration shows a Chrome tab running the Firefox interface, which then loads a blog page while consuming a 233MB Gecko WebAssembly binary. Developers built this project using approximately $25,000 worth of Claude Opus and Fable tokens to handle the complex compilation tasks. Traffic between the nested browsers passes through Puter’s servers via the Wisp protocol, a necessity because browser security policies prevent direct network connections from WebAssembly modules. The team scaled their infrastructure to manage the load generated during initial discussions on Hacker News. Puter states the setup supports end-to-end encryption, though traffic to external sites like example.com remains unencrypted unless those sites enforce HTTPS. While the technical achievement proves browsers can run inside browsers, the practical utility remains limited by the significant overhead and reliance on the host server.
- The project consumed around $25,000 in AI tokens for development.
- A 233MB WebAssembly file runs the complete Gecko engine.
- External traffic to non-HTTPS sites is not encrypted in this configuration.
