The PlayStation 5 has a hidden web browser; here’s how to find it

Officially, the PlayStation 5 does not include a web browser, marking an apparent software downgrade from the PlayStation 4. But Ars discovered that the PS5 actually includes a limited and hidden web browsing interface that you can use to load websites. credits on your TV in a pinch.

Getting in

The easiest way to access the PS5 web browser is to go to the system settings and load the user guide. Unlike most other system information menus, this one loads in a web browser that points to the live URL at manuals.playstation.net.

If you visit this address from a standard PC or mobile web browser, the site displays an error message. But if you access it from the PS5 menu, you see an image explaining “how to navigate this user guide” with the DualSense controller, as seen above.

While this user guide is fun (and informative) to play, it does not offer any external links that could provide a link to the wider web. And with no option to just type in a generalized URL through the PS5 interface, the User’s Guide is of limited use for surfing the Information Superhighway (as all the hippest kids in years would say. 90).

To get this kind of wider access, you need to scroll down to the Users and Accounts menu on the PS5 and head to the “Link with other services” option. There you can choose to link to a Twitter account, which opens a web page with a Twitter login prompt.

As designed, this page is intended to log into Twitter, link your account to the PS5, and return you to the system menu. However, if you click on the little Twitter icon in the top corner, it will take you to the standard Twitter web interface instead, just as it would in any other browser. Log in from there and you’ll have full access to Twitter through the PS5’s web browser.

While you still can’t type in the URL bar on this interface, Twitter.com does provide (slightly cumbersome) access to the wider web via clickable links in tweets and profile descriptions. If the site you’re interested in has a Twitter account (or is just discussed on social media), finding those links is usually as easy as typing your target in the Twitter search bar.

You can even plug in a USB keyboard to make it easier to find and / or browse links with the arrow and Enter keys. USB mice don’t seem to work with the PS5 browser, however, you still need to use the DualSense controllers to scroll or move the pointer on the screen.

Testing the waters of the web

After some spot testing, we found that the PS5 web browser seems to work fine for pages that are mostly text and images. The multimedia and / or interactive pages were a bit more hit and miss, however.

Video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch performed without too much trouble on the PS5, with sound, although the attempt to “full screen” with video failed on all of them. Music streaming sites like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, on the other hand, could usually load the interface, but couldn’t play music through the PS5 in our testing.

Web-based games were also pretty spotty in our PS5 browser tests. Games and / or emulators encoded in pure HTML and JavaScript seem to load, although controls are a problem unless they are designed to work with a simple keyboard. Games that require WebGL, Flash, or other more sophisticated web libraries seem to fail, however. This includes the Internet Archive’s huge library of emulated software; the site’s DOSBox and MESS / MAME web implementations seemed to freeze immediately after loading resources to the PS5.

When it comes to productivity sites, I was surprised that I could log into Ars’ Slack web interface and even type my coworkers from the PS5. Ars Technica’s WordPress-based content management system also loaded, although I decided to write this post on a PC (after struggling to write a similar post on an Xbox One seven years ago). years).

Trying to write to Google Docs, however, led to an error asking me to upgrade my browser (if only that was possible) and an inability to type in the main compose window. The main site menu worked fine, however, so I could create a full document by inserting web images and “special characters” one by one on the PS5 if I really wanted to.

Why is it hidden?

It might seem odd for Sony to build a decently functioning web browser in the PS5 and then hide it where most users will never really use it. This may seem particularly odd since the PS4 featured a fully supported web browser with a URL bar and quick access to “frequently used pages”. It seems even stranger when you notice that the PS5’s menu system actually includes a “Web browser” settings section where you can disable JavaScript, delete cookies, and “prevent cross-site tracking”.

That said, for Sony, upgrading the PS5 browser from its current “run down interface for user guide and web service connections” to a “full browser that works reliably on the web” would likely require a decent effort (and customer support). . And Sony recently suggested that effort just isn’t a priority right now.

“Currently, we have no plans to include a web browser in PS5,” Sony senior vice president Hideaki Nishino said in a recent interview with the Japanese site AV Watch (as translated by Twitter user Nibel). “We doubt the need for a web browser for a game console as an app, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

(On the Xbox One and S / X series, third-party browsers like Monument may serve your browsing needs well).

At the moment, if you are desperate to load a webpage through your PS5 for some reason, the above workaround will allow you to do so. But don’t be surprised if this is the closest thing to official PS5 web browsing support in the near future.