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Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

vale.rocks

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

#11

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

Re: Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

#12
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.

Re: Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

#17
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.

Re: Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

#18

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.

Re: Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

#20
post #6

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.

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