Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles | Hacker News Reader

Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

vale.rocks

178 pointsrobin_reala82 comments

The browser on the Wii was amazing. I didn't use it all that often, but I was a big Opera fan back in the day, and it was amazing to see how well their engine scaled to all kinds of systems.

As far as I remember, there were even some games that supported the Wiimote natively? I don't remember if this was via Flash or Javascript, but there seems to be a library for the latter: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/wii-js

I unfortunately never got to use the Nintendo DS version (the DS being WEP-only was a dealbreaker for me).

I bought the NDS version back in the day and let me tell you it was not worth the 40€ of my pocket money.

I remember how, if you wanted to swap the top and bottom screens, it would spin and spin and spin… definitely a painful experience.

I actually think it was worth the money though, at least for me, because having a pocketable device that could access the internet was so special at that time.

Also, the DSi’s web browser was legitimately good. In addition to being fast enough, the zoomed out bottom screen and zoomed in top screen was great for browsing designed-for-a-desktop websites.

I ended up getting that "Not really a flashcart" Datel DS flashcart, and I loaded it up with DSOrganize, a homebrew "OS"

https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/DSOrganize

It had a semi functional web browser included, without the RAM expansion cart! It somehow managed to browse most simple web pages on the inbuilt RAM from a hobbyist!

It also had an IRC client, and that was my introduction to IRC

And Internet Radio! You could point it at an internet radio station with a special "playlist" file that had a URL, so that's how I helped feed my Technobase.fm addiction at the time, before smartphones. I could carry around my DS and listen to internet radio!

Now Datel is a name I haven't heard in a while. Reminds me of those action replay devices which modified the console's memory to cheat. Ahh the nostalgia.

yeah, I had low expectations but not that low.

I ended up using it on "lite websites" to read the news while commuting to work on the free wifi.

I remember using Orb on the Wii way back then for media streaming. Good times!

Yep, I remember a brief period of time where I would play Flash games on the Wii browser, I think there were indeed some that were explicitly made for the Wii browser. Fun times!

If only the Wii had supported 1080p or even 720p output, it could have been a great way to browse the web in your living room. Many companies have tried this, but none of them had the correct input device. I think this could have changed the overall direction of technology.

Unfortunately, at 640x480 everything was too small, even back then.

I found even the 256x192 resolution of the DSi browser to be a fine size to use. I don't think 640x480 was too small.

It’s definitely usable, it’s just not a first-class experience. Like the difference between browsing a non-responsive website on an iPhone versus a desktop.

A few games did use Wii-JS - one of my most favorite projects to have worked on over the years, lol

Some docs: https://web.archive.org/web/20070603082704/http://dev.opera....

The site for Homestar Runner had some wii specific flash games.

https://old.homestarrunner.com/videlectrix/vii/

I was chatting to the author and it turned out that it’s not common knowledge that Dreamkey supported the Dreamcast light gun. You used the d-pad on the back to scroll, then shot links to navigate. I think this interaction method deserves a resurrection!

That's pretty good, but what about with the fishing controller?

I definitely remember trying it, but can’t remember what the outcome was. I went through a phase of trying to play various games with controllers they weren’t designed for.

I was amazed recently by how locked down the hidden PlayStation 5 browser is.

You can’t access it as an app through the dashboard, but it appears if you click a URL from a message. So people were sending themselves “google[.]com”, clicking, and enjoying web access.

But it seems Sony have even clamped down on that. I sent a message to myself recently, the link wasn’t clickable, and I got a message to say my PlayStation Network account had received a warning and could be suspended if I did it again!

> I got a message to say my PlayStation Network account had received a warning and could be suspended if I did it again!

What?!? Really? Did they cite what rule you had violated?

“Sharing malicious URLs, including those that may harm another player.”

The URL was google[.]com.

It's still a wise idea to take it seriously. Many years ago, a then 17 y/o old ( German ) friend of mine did mitm on his own console in order to replace a video stream in ps home, recorded it for youtube/laughs. Not much later he was SWATed by the german police as if he was some kind of terrorist. His parents got a heart attack. Next he received financial death threats from a ultra expensive UK based law firm send by Sony.

They are used to exploit known vulns to get arbitrary read write, calls. For cheating. Both freebsd kernel exploits and browser exploits.

Also for rooting the console, which makes it way easier to run cracked games. I think I saw a browser being used for getting root access first with PS3 unless I misremember.

Weird to see this is still a thing on the latest console generation. Xbox runs software under HyperV which should make exploitation difficult

The PS5 also runs apps (games/browser) under a hypervisor. There was a hypervisor escape though coupled with webkit as an entrypoint:

* https://ps5dev.github.io/ps5-wiki/hypervisor

* https://github.com/PS5Dev/Byepervisor

* https://github.com/PS5Dev/PS5-UMTX-Jailbreak/blob/main/READM...

Through this article, I guess I am one of today's lucky 10k to learn about anchor links to text like https://vale.rocks/posts/game-console-browsers#:~:text=SurfE...

It's only a few years old and cross browser support hasn't been amazing until lately so most people do not know about it at all.

https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments

First support was Chrome 80 (Feb 2020) and Opera 67 (Mar 2020).

Safari picked it up in 2022. Firefox in 2024.

My first experience with porn was the Dreamcast browser.

It's funny that this was my first thought, too. I am sure game console browsers were an entry point for whole generations of kids.

Mine WOULD have been through the Dreamcast, but because my parents were early adopters of Broadband internet, we never had a dial-up connection to hook the modem up to.

I did a bit of curious searching on the family PC, but one time I forgot to wipe the history, and the game was up. The first thing with a web browser that was "mine" was the PSP in high school, and I even had a special second memory card (512MB) that I would save things to that I'd take it out and hide it in a crevice in my bedframe when I was done.

Later in its life, the Dreamcast release the "broadband adapter", a 100mbit Ethernet replacement for the modem. Worked great, but very limited support in games. That plus a DC keyboard and mouse made me BRUTAL in quake 3... until someone worked out how to join DC games from the PC.

I actually had to go check to make sure the DC did originally have a modem before posting. I've been dabbling in Dreamcast modding the last couple of years, and the only network adapter that came to mind was the broadband one which, colored my childhood memories a bit. I remember there being a very specific reason we couldn't get the DC online, and "not having a long enough ethernet cable" definitely wasn't it.

> I did a bit of curious searching on the family PC, but one time I forgot to wipe the history, and the game was up.

Hahaha that takes me back to the time my friend got hold of a 3.5” floppy with some Playboy pics on it, and then called me in a panic because Windows had helpfully added them to the “recent files” list and he couldn’t figure out how to clear it.

I would like to understand the pedigree of those images. Someone had to go through an awful LOT of trouble to save them to a floppy... This leaves a lot of open questions. Scanners at the time were technological torture apparatus.

This is only tangentially related to early high-quality materials, but since I'm already strolling down memory lane: My dad used to work as an after-hours maintenance tech at a graphic imaging company. For several years my mom worked days and my dad worked nights. Occasionally, my brother and I would get to go to work with either parent to give the other a break from watching us every day.

Going to work with dad was fun. Somehow he determined we wouldn't be able to do any harm, and let us sit at some of the editing stations (Macintosh Quadras of some type, iirc) and mess around in Photoshop (I think version 5.0 or 6.0?). Of course we got to digging through the files. One of them had a couple folders of some pin-up photoshoots. Incredibly high-resolution scans displayed proudly on a 20" Applevision CRT rivaling the size of our home television. Photos that would have taken an hour to download over the web if you could even find a place hosting them. We were too young to really appreciate it, but thinking back, that's an experience I'd be willing to bet none of my peers had.

There was also a folder of promotional monster truck material and some photoshoots from car shows. We were definitely more interested in those.

Sitting in that warm cramped room surrounded by 8 workstations with TENS of gigabytes of spinning rust will forever be a core memory. I miss the old HDD sound.

Excellent bit of oral history, thanks!

No idea, this was in the early 90s so we're talking very low resolution pics. I imagine they'd been sneakernetted around school yards for months on floppies after someone found their parent's stash and managed to yoink a copy.

I seem to remember some pirate copies of art packages (maybe Photon paint) on the Amiga coming with a similar set of images that would be of interest to some teenagers...

I hate to admit it, but I'm pretty sure that's the same for me, too. Dial-up, NetZero I think. Waiting for images to download...

I used to use my Dreamcast to browse the web. I had bought the keyboard and mouse peripherals to play Quake 3, and they worked with the browser. Back then I would use a variety of free dial up internet providers. Once the free trial ran out I would have to find another. This was in addition to the Internet that my parents were paying for.

Yep I used the Dreamcast web browser too. 33k moden in pal regions Vs USA which had 56k. I didn't even have a keyboard or mouse.

The Game Boy Color/GBA also had a web browser in the form of the Mobile Trainer GB, although it didn't allow inputting arbitrary URLs (although one can modify the DNS, it wasn't documented) and its limited subset of HTML might stretch the definition of "web browser" a little.

> and in 2000, [Dreamcast USA, Planetweb] Web Browser 2.0 released with better JavaScript support and support for Macromedia Flash. It also added support for uploading and downloading Dreamcast save games, downloading and playing MP3s, and included a full copy of the puzzle game Sega Swirl.

There was a time in my life where this was the only web browser I had access to at a certain physical location, and I used it constantly along with the E-mail and IRC components.

It was cool that the whole package of WWW+Mail+IRC was small enough (~10MiB in its final version) that it could come on other discs without being a space burden. I had a 9/99 Dreamcast that came with the 1.0 Planetweb originally, and it was great to get a fresh version on the Official Dreamcast Magazine disc every few months.

Article also fails to mention that a ton of games came with the same browser built-in, like there would be a main menu item to access the game's official website that would pop open the bundled Planetweb and dial using the globally saved connection settings. Gotta get your Y2K New Years Sonic Adventure DLC! https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Adventure_Downloadable_Eve...

I specifically 'member lusting after the Power Mac G4 and G4 Cube in the Apple online store via Dreamcast browser in 2000 lol

Same! My PC broke down and I couldn't afford to repair it for several months. Yet I didn't miss it much as I had a Dreamcast with a keyboard and mouse. That web browser became one of my most used apps of all time. Good times!

I remember a couple of people making websites specifically for these apps. Wasn't super common, but there were definitely a few Nintendo forums and communities that were built with the 3DS browser's viewport and design in mind.

And while there's nothing official, there are ways to use the built in Switch browser like a normal browser through homebrew as well. I think one setup even allows functionality the default browser doesn't support, like normal HTML video tags.

It's kind of funny that the entire purpose of a browser is to protect the user machine from arbitrary code on the internet and also it's one of the main attack vectors on a console.

Sega Channel had a web browser, but it never got released. Page rendering was done on another computer, and converted to image data so the Genesis could view it.

Web browsers on game consoles have also been easy entrypoints for modding systems without using additional hardware.

For example, the Wii U browser has been the primary entrypoint for modding the Wii U for much of the console's lifespan [1] [2].

And the original Wii had some browser-based exploits as well later in its lifespan. For example, FlashHax [3], a 2017 exploit for the Flash player in the Wii Internet Channel, and str2hax [4], a 2018 exploit which took advantage of the fact that the EULA was HTML loaded over HTTP. I believe the exploits were primarily used to distribute a simple patcher that would change the server address for online play in games to point to Wiimmfi which was a replacement for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection [5] [6]. Most other homebrew tools required an SD card, and most other entrypoints used an SD card as well.

[1]: https://wiiu.hacks.guide/aroma/browser-exploit.html

[2]: https://chadsoft.co.uk/install-guide/#wiiu_55

[3]: https://gbatemp.net/threads/new-free-homebrew-entry-point-fl...

[4]: https://gbatemp.net/threads/a-channel-less-sd-less-entry-poi...

[5]: https://wiimmfi.de/patcher/flashhax

[6]: https://wiimmfi.de/patcher/str2hax

Before the PSP had a legit browser, you could get online by exploiting Wipeout Pure's update or dlc d/l mechanism.

https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/the-new-psp-web-bro...

I remember poking around at the Wii U browser. Nintendo had examples of fetching the current state of buttons, analog sticks, and the touch screen to monitor for input.

While cool on paper, there wasn't a preventDefault() solution. So you could make a simple game where a sprite could move around and respond to "A," but if you press B, the browser would try to go Back a page. As the article mentions, the shoulder buttons activated a Gyro-based scroll mode (which wasn't great). "B" would go Back a page, Y would close/open the "curtain" on the TV, X would open the URL bar (thus showing the software keyboard and taking over all inputs), and Start/Select also did something, although I've since forgotten what.

So, although all button inputs were present, almost all of them also did something on the browser level, so nothing exciting ever came of it.

Kind of surprised that the current Chromium-based Edge gets no attention other than being mentioned. It is basically the same as the desktop Edge. Easily the most capable browser a console has ever had.

It has support for things like the gamepad API, wasm, etc. You can do things like run emulators via RetroArch web using your gamepad properly.

It's video support includes MP4/MKV with H264+AAC/AC3/MP3. I've used it to stream local movie files using just a static HTTP server and my video player app.

https://web.libretro.com/ https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html

Surprised to see no mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.com a terrible portable handheld that offered a 14.4 kbit/s modem cartridge.

Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of too. It came out in 1997 and predates all the Game Boy stuff. IIRC there was a "Game Boy don't TOUCH the net!" marketing campaign but I can't seem to find find it now. The commercial is a fun nostalgia trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-ON6wxHtUE

Even if you got the extra modem gear, tho, the browser was text-only. I doubt many kids got it; I did not.

It was ambitious of Tiger (a movie-tie-in LCD game company) to try to rival the big dogs, and it makes sense but is a shame it couldn't. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

I am frustrated that my PS5 lacks a browser now. It seems crazy that I have a computer today that does not have a browser when there are computers that are just browsers. We seem to have taken a step back here.

PS5 supports keyboard and mouse, there is no reason why it can't be a browserbox...

I think the reason is that other consoles were jailbroken because of their browser, so now sony doesnt include it.

The PS5 does have a browser, used for the "User Guide" which can be opened from the settings.

If you change the PS5's DNS server in network settings, you can make the user guide open Google or Duckduckgo, from which you can browse to anywhere you want.

Same for switch 1/2. it even has a browser built-in so you can log in to wifi captive portals but you can't access it through any normal means.

There was also the various attempts at TV web browsers back in the CRT era and also that some modern smart TVs ship an outdated Chromium build that doesn't work right.

The Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) had the Randnet Browser.

I skimmed but did not see any references to browser-based jailbreaks simplifying pwning several consoles.

It is mentioned as a reason why the recent Sony and Nintendo consoles no longer have a general purpose web browser.

As mentioned with other comment, web browsers on console were often a popular and easy way to jailbreak your console and install custom firmwares, etc. The 3DS one was bonkers, and I think you could directly download games from Nintendo servers without verification?

PSP had an excellent browser. I tired to use it a few months ago, and it won't connect to any current wifi networks.

Which is a shame, because the PSP also had an excellent RSS reader. These days I could see me using it as a dedicated RSS device.

I am surprised how deeply rooted Macromedia flash was.

For a console browser to chug Flash is impressive.

Flash was on a bunch of mobile platforms, just not iOS. When it became clear that Apple were going to take a sizeable chunk of the market and were never going to support it, Adobe decided to cut their losses: https://web.archive.org/web/20111116013328/http://blogs.adob...

IIRC Android gave up on Flash after iOS and before Adobe's announcement

Well back in the day, if you wanted to provide some interactive experience worth having on the web, you did it Flash.

It fits entirely to be supported on consoles.

I remember trying to browse a Flash build promo website for Transformers 2 on my PSP (what a 2009 sentence) and it wouldn't load. I was quite disappointed.

SteamOS is the best thing which happen in gaming for last year. I love to play and experiment with the extensions and modes which is mostly not possible with other consoles without jailbreaks and patches.

I'm actually frustrated we lost web browser access on gaming consoles, especially in the era of people calling for technical support to their internet providers for "it's too slow" and we can't run a proper speedtest to the world from the console to figure out if it's the gaming provider or the Internet connection...

Throw some of us in support a bone, will ya?

This was a fantastic article!

Author here. I recognise you from LW. Glad you enjoyed it!

If they brought up CDI and Pippin, then why leave out Commodore CDTV and CD32?

My stock CD32 doesn't have any connectivity that would support a browser. Adding an SX-1 module would make the unit a lot like an Amiga 1200 in a silly case w/ a CD-ROM drive, but you'd be limited to serial connectivity and SLIP/PPP (since there's no PCMCIA slot-- the typical method of adding Ethernet connectivity to an A1200).

I didn't have a CDTV so I can't comment on the hardware specifics. If I remember right it's an Amiga 500 (or 500+?) in a funny case w/ a CD-ROM and would suffer from the same lack of connectivity as the CD32.

Browsers on consoles and resellable game media... Those were the days ...

I thought the switch had a browser for a little bit. Am I mistaken?

It technically has one, but the only way to use it was to tap on some various links until you managed to get to a Google search page. It was never intended for actual use outside of Nintendo's curated pages.

feeling so nostalgic rn – totally forgot about these! ty

I remember the Wii U browser’s MP4 playback being surprisingly helpful. Running the `http-server` npm package, I was able to get video from my laptop to the TV in a pinch.

Adding in Handbrake, it wasn’t that bad of a setup!

Truth be told, the Wii U gamepad is basically h.264 and Wi-Fi as well.

Yep, here's the documentation for the GamePad protocol: https://libdrc.org/docs/re/index.html

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