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
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 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.
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!
Unfortunately, at 640x480 everything was too small, even back then.
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
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!
* https://ps5dev.github.io/ps5-wiki/hypervisor
* https://github.com/PS5Dev/Byepervisor
* https://github.com/PS5Dev/PS5-UMTX-Jailbreak/blob/main/READM...
What?!? Really? Did they cite what rule you had violated?
The URL was google[.]com.
First support was Chrome 80 (Feb 2020) and Opera 67 (Mar 2020).
Safari picked it up in 2022. Firefox in 2024.
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.
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.
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.
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/the-new-psp-web-bro...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a console browser to chug Flash is impressive.
It fits entirely to be supported on consoles.
Throw some of us in support a bone, will ya?
Adding in Handbrake, it wasn’t that bad of a setup!