windows-web-next
A browser-based Windows 11 simulation built for human annotation and computer-use agent research.
- Recreates a desktop environment with window management, taskbar, start menu, and bundled apps in Svelte
- Includes a reactive in-memory filesystem and app surface for realistic computer-use interaction traces
- Serves as a controlled environment for annotation, evaluation, and agent training rather than just a visual parody of Windows
windows-web-next is interesting because it sits on the boundary between product UI and research infrastructure.
On the surface it is a browser-based Windows 11 simulation. Underneath, it is clearly built as an interaction environment: it has a window manager, task switching, a start menu, context menus, a virtual filesystem, and a suite of lightweight apps including File Explorer, Terminal, Notepad, Paint, Mail, Maps, Store, and more.
What makes it useful is not pixel-perfect mimicry. It is that the environment exposes the kinds of structured actions computer-use systems need: opening applications, navigating folders, manipulating files, resizing windows, handling menus, and moving through a desktop workflow in a controllable way.
The in-memory filesystem is a good example of the project's intent. It models drives, folders, files, path normalization, creation, deletion, copy, move, and rename operations, which is exactly the kind of substrate you want if you are collecting annotations or evaluating an autonomous agent against desktop-like tasks without handing it a real machine.
The result is a pragmatic middle layer: more realistic than a toy benchmark, safer and more inspectable than a real desktop, and much easier to instrument for human annotation and agent evaluation.
Repo: JacobFV/windows-web-next
Used by
synthux uses this simulator as one of its three native execution substrates. Each terminal affordance in a synthux grammar tree is compiled into low-level mouse and keyboard input against the real Notepad, Terminal, Edge, Mail, Wordpad, and VSCode windows here. The SynthUX bridge (src/lib/embed-bridge.ts) exposes window.__synthuxLaunchApp(appId) so the synthux launcher overlay can route launches through the simulator's normal wm.openApp flow without any high-level state mutation.
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