So they have a web browser for the sole purpose of setting up an GLES context for their UI? On a video game console? I guess that's what you do when you suddenly have 8GB of RAM, you piss it away on useless shit...
Not to mention, my crappy phone runs Chrome. If it can do that, certainly a device that uses up to 100 watts, has 16x the ram, 100x the graphics/cpu can too without it being considered a drain.
But this is still a proprietary, "junky" interface. If it's WebGL, it's still entirely custom, with entirely custom event handling, and entirely custom accessibility (or lack thereof), and entirely custom everything. If you are just using WebGL, which is what they said, then the browser is a massive chunk of dead weight that's doing jack shit. All the browser did is setup the EGL context, create a GLES context from that, and then handed it to you. This is basic hello world stuff, that's the entirety of the browser's involvement in this scenario.
Plus the browser runtime still gives you things even if you're going the pure-GL UI route: networking, a JSON parser, a database (Local Storage), cookies and session management, a (arguably awful) security model... how is the browser "dead weight"?
And I called it dead weight because we're talking client-side offline UI here, so things like cookies and session management are irrelevant. But the dead weight is going to come from the bulk of the browser code that is HTML/CSS parsing, webkit/blink, the graphics model that's not being used, font support that's not being used, etc... Those things you list are all really small pieces.
I don't disagree that there's a lot wasted but I'd probably have made the same trade-off given the circumstances.
The PS4's UI isn't particularly resource-constrained as far as I know and it's often easier to start with a familiar environment with everything and the kitchen sink than to start with nothing and hand-pick blocks along the way. Plus based on Sony's past in-house UI performance, the "glue libraries together from floor 0" approach wasn't working out for them.
So far the PS4's UI is getting good reviews and is generally described as "responsive" so it sounds like they didn't really lose - in a modern device where you'll end up porting a browser anyway I don't see why using it for UI is such a sin.
As a cynic, I would say web apps are all about proprietary junky interfaces instead of using my platforms standard GUI. Reminds me a bit of the VB6 days where every program used to define its own true button color... (except the modern web apps look a lot nicer, of course).
And (memory) performance is of critical importance if the PS4 supports multitasking such as the Xbox One does (don't know if it does).
You're having maybe 1000 particles or a 50,000 polygons. Much lighter weight. It doesn't /need/ the performance that a game does.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/11/playstation-4-hardware...
Performance in general still matters a lot on the PS desktop. Case in point, my PS3, which takes a godawful amount of time to load all the screen icons.
Interface performance is really fucking important, and I sure hope people like Sony and Microsoft care when it comes to their consoles.
People like EA and the notoriously terrible Battlefield* interfaces obviously do not care. (The original Battlefield 1942 would switch from your native resolution and refresh rate and color depth and put the screen in 800x600 16bit 60hz every single time you hit the escape button.)
The performance of the desktop on the PS3 and PS4 is less important to the gamer than the performance of the games, also known as the primary purpose of the device.
However, that doesn't mean that it is unimportant.
The PS3 has two graphics APIs, OpenGL ES 1.x with Cg for shaders and LibCGM.
Most game studios never used the OpenGL ES API.
The game industry does not care that much about open standards like the FOSS community does.
What counts it getting a game idea sponsored and on the hands of paying customers, regardless of any tool religion.
Porting to multiple platforms is an outsourcing business that is part of the industry since the early days.
WebGL might be less performant but honestly, for a menu system it's plenty fast, so what's the big deal here? Honest question.
You assume the renderer they're using uses a large chunk of RAM. You assume they use exactly the same browser for the home interface as the normal web browsing. You assume that they're keeping the home interface in memory (and wasting resources) when you're playing a game.
Console has 8GB of RAM. Games are only guaranteed 4.5GB of that. You do the math.
Complain about it being useless shit.
Where have all of these cynical people come from today? Every discussion I've wandered into today has had a good showing of judgmental, know-better, seemingly angry people.