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Yes, the emulated computer emulates a network device. This sends the Ethernet frames via web sockets to the proxy server. On the proxy server, the frames are written to a TAP device. Then some firewall rules do the rest.

Why do you even need the additional layer of redirection when most (port 80 tcp) traffic can be done straight from the browser?

Most port 80 TCP traffic can't be done straight from the browser. E.g. it won't let you write arbitrary headers.

Cross-domain requests won't work for the majority of sites.

And non-HTTP requests can't be done at all from the browser, it would be a pretty limited "network interface" if all it could do was call out to XMLHTTPRequest.

Run the websocket proxy yourself and get much better performance: https://github.com/benjamincburns/websockproxy

From the FAQ: "net_url sets the URL of the websocket VPN." I did this and it works great.