Browse the live web from the PC bang

pcbang.io is a virtual internet cafe in your browser. Its computers come with a virtual browser that shows the web as it was in 2003 (from the Wayback Machine). With the pcbang.io Virtual Browser extension it shows the real, live web instead: videos, social media, forums, with your own sign-ins.

Install

Get it from the Chrome Web Store Get it for Firefox

After installing: open pcbang.io, click the extension's button in your browser's toolbar, and allow it. The button shows ON for that tab. Sit at a PC and open the virtual browser.

• Chrome (and Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc): install from the Chrome Web Store. Everything works, including Share (show your page to the people around you).
• Edge: install from the same Chrome Web Store page; Edge asks once to allow extensions from other stores.
• Firefox: install from Firefox Add-ons. Live sites work; sign-ins to Google and X may not carry over (Firefox keeps the cookies of sites inside other pages separate), and Share isn't available (Firefox can't share part of a tab).
• Safari: not available yet. The cafe works there; the virtual browser shows the web as it was in 2003.

What it does

• It only acts in a pcbang.io tab where you switched it on, and only on pages shown inside the virtual browser. Leaving pcbang.io or closing the tab switches it off.
• It lets those pages load inside the virtual browser (sites normally refuse to be shown inside another page) and keeps you signed in there.
• Banking, email and password-manager sites never load inside the virtual browser: they open in a real browser tab.

Permissions, and why

• Access to all websites (asked when you first switch it on): any site can be opened in the virtual browser.
• Cookies: to keep you signed in to a site inside the virtual browser, using that site's own cookies. Your cookies are never changed, read for any other purpose, or sent anywhere.
• Web requests, request rules, scripting, navigation: to let pages show inside the virtual browser, keep them working there (address bar, back/forward) and keep them inside it.
• Storage: the extension's own state for the current browser session.

Privacy policy

The pcbang.io Virtual Browser extension collects no data. It has no analytics, no tracking and no servers of its own; nothing you browse leaves your browser because of it.

• Cookies stay in your browser. The extension only makes a site's own cookies available to that same site inside the virtual browser.
• The diagnostics log (type about:log in the virtual browser's address bar) lives in your browser's memory for the session and records page addresses without their query strings and cookie names without values. It is only saved to a file if you click to save it.
• What other players in the cafe can see of your virtual browser: an empty browser window on your monitor, never the address or the page, unless you press Share, which sends the picture and sound of your page to the players around you while it's on.

Questions: [email protected], or @pcbang_io on X.