PS3 gamer’s browser experiments and results

We don’t know if you’ll ever meet a guy who is claiming that the Playstation 3 browser is somewhere between that of a mobile device and a regular desktop. Well, we did – not in person, but through his online site Design215. He’s Robert Giordano. His claims, if we may add, were not caused by moments of loneliness and hundreds of PS3 units stolen. Giordano has a little experiment to back them up.

First, he stated that the console uses a version of the NetFront Browser as its web browser – the very same software mainly used on mobile devices like phones and pocket PCs. He then began with a document object model. According to Giordano, he created a test page that “displays the user-agent and HTTP-accept headers sent to the server, and if JavaScript is available, loops through the list of supported mime types and plugins.”

The result? The PS3 apparently does not send an HTTP-accept header to the server. It supports Javascript but he will not divulge which version. Despite that, the console reports no mime types, no plugins, and no Javascript errors. He then proceeded with a couple more of tests that concern DHTML layers, AJAX Support, as well as Flash Support.

Some worked fine, but others didn’t. It was quite funny that Giordano was delighted to know YouTube works. The details of the experiment can be viewed via the Read link below. But because we love you, here’s a summary of Giordano’s work:

• Framesets and iframes are not supported. The browser will attempt to open some framesets in separate windows but the results are less than desirable. This is bad news for people who use hidden iframes for their Web 2.0 apps.
• CSS2 seems well supported and Standards compliant pages look good, especially if they are XHTML 1.0.
• Javascript is somewhat supported but there doesn’t seem to be any AJAX support.
• Certain events are missing (as they would be on mobile devices) like “onkeydown” and so on.
• Using “for(x in y)” to loop through the properties of a Javascript object doesn’t work but you can test for the existence of individual properties.
• Dynamically loading external Javascript files after the page has loaded doesn’t seem to work. More bad news for Web 2.0 apps.
• When using the on-screen keypad, the browser will add a space after each word. It does this on password fields as well, which can cause a bit of frustration if you don’t remove the extra space at the end before you try to log in. I discovered this trying to log in to Gmail.

We don’t know if you’ll ever meet a guy who is claiming that the Playstation 3 browser is somewhere between that of a mobile device and a regular desktop. Well, we did – not in person, but through his online site Design215. He’s Robert Giordano. His claims, if we may add, were not caused by moments of loneliness and hundreds of PS3 units stolen. Giordano has a little experiment to back them up.

First, he stated that the console uses a version of the NetFront Browser as its web browser – the very same software mainly used on mobile devices like phones and pocket PCs. He then began with a document object model. According to Giordano, he created a test page that “displays the user-agent and HTTP-accept headers sent to the server, and if JavaScript is available, loops through the list of supported mime types and plugins.”

The result? The PS3 apparently does not send an HTTP-accept header to the server. It supports Javascript but he will not divulge which version. Despite that, the console reports no mime types, no plugins, and no Javascript errors. He then proceeded with a couple more of tests that concern DHTML layers, AJAX Support, as well as Flash Support.

Some worked fine, but others didn’t. It was quite funny that Giordano was delighted to know YouTube works. The details of the experiment can be viewed via the Read link below. But because we love you, here’s a summary of Giordano’s work:

• Framesets and iframes are not supported. The browser will attempt to open some framesets in separate windows but the results are less than desirable. This is bad news for people who use hidden iframes for their Web 2.0 apps.
• CSS2 seems well supported and Standards compliant pages look good, especially if they are XHTML 1.0.
• Javascript is somewhat supported but there doesn’t seem to be any AJAX support.
• Certain events are missing (as they would be on mobile devices) like “onkeydown” and so on.
• Using “for(x in y)” to loop through the properties of a Javascript object doesn’t work but you can test for the existence of individual properties.
• Dynamically loading external Javascript files after the page has loaded doesn’t seem to work. More bad news for Web 2.0 apps.
• When using the on-screen keypad, the browser will add a space after each word. It does this on password fields as well, which can cause a bit of frustration if you don’t remove the extra space at the end before you try to log in. I discovered this trying to log in to Gmail.