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).

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

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.

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.

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

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