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When loading manuals.playstation.com from the PS5 menu, this set of “How to Navigate” instructions appears.
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Use the left stick to move the pointer and the X button to click on the links.
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That is useful information, thank you.
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You can even zoom in on the text to enlarge it if it’s far from the screen.
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Clicking on the search box brings up the usual on-screen keyboard interface.
Officially, the PlayStation 5 does not include a web browser, which marks an apparent degradation of the PlayStation 4 software. But Ars has found that the PS5 actually includes a hidden and limited web browsing interface that you can use to load generic websites on TV in a pinch.
Entering
The easiest way to access the PS5 web browser is to go into the system settings and load the User Guide. Unlike most other informational menus on the system, this one is loaded within a web browser pointing to the live URL at manuals.playstation.net.
If you visit that 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 will 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 around with, it does not provide any external links that might provide a link to the general web. And with no option to type a generalized URL via the PS5 interface, the User Guide is of limited use for navigating the information superhighway (as all the hippest 90s kids would say).
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However, if you click on this link in the corner, you can log into Twitter.com through the main web interface.
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My newsfeed, as it looked this morning on my PS5.
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Hey, I know that place!
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Yet another way to get your daily dose of Ars.
To get that kind of more extensive access, you need to scroll down to the Users and Accounts menu on the PS5 and go to the “Link to other services” option. There, you can choose to link to a Twitter account, which opens a web page with a Twitter login message.
As designed, this page is intended to log into Twitter, link your account to the PS5, and return to the system menu. However, if you click on the little Twitter icon in the top corner, you will go to the standard Twitter web interface, just as it would appear in any other browser. Log in from there and you will get full access to Twitter through the PS5’s web browser.
Although you can’t type in the URL bar on this interface yet, Twitter.com offers (a bit cumbersome) access to the general web through clickable links in tweets and profile descriptions. If the site you are interested in has a Twitter account (or is simply discussed on social media), finding those links is usually as simple as typing your goal in the Twitter search bar.
You can even connect a USB keyboard to simplify searching and / or jump between links with the arrow and Enter keys. However, USB mice don’t seem to work with the PS5’s browser; you still need to use the DualSense joysticks to scroll or move the on-screen pointer.
Testing the waters of the web
After some spot testing, we found that the PS5 web browser seems to work well for pages that are mostly text and images. However, the multimedia and / or interactive pages were a bit more unpredictable.
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What better way to learn more about Xbox Series S / X than through the PS5 web browser?
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Although there is no official Vimeo app on the PS5, you can still upload Vimeo videos through the web browser (if you can find them).
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Fully Javascript-based emulators can run games (like this homebrew snippet) in the PS5 browser.
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Games that require libraries like WebGL are not compatible with the PS5.
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When loading a Spotify playlist via PS5 browser, I get this error message.
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Ars staff fail to be funny in command.
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You can insert symbols and images into Google Docs on the PS5, but you can’t type …
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Why is there a web browser settings menu if you don’t want people to use it?
Video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch all worked without much trouble on the PS5, complete with sound, although trying to go “full screen” with a video failed each. Music streaming sites like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, on the other hand, were generally able to load the interface, but couldn’t actually play music through the PS5 in our tests.
Web-based games were also quite spotty in our PS5 browser tests. Games and / or emulators that are encoded in pure HTML and Javascript seem to load, although the controls were a problem unless they were designed to work with only a keyboard. However, games that require WebGL, Flash, or other more sophisticated web libraries seemed to fail. That includes the huge library of emulated software from the Internet Archive; The web-based implementations of the DOSBox and MESS / MAME site appeared to freeze immediately after uploading assets to the PS5.
When it comes to productivity sites, I was surprised that I was able to log into the Ars Slack web interface and even write to my co-workers from the PS5. Ars Technica’s WordPress-based content management system loaded as well, although I decided to write this post on a PC (after struggling to write a similar post on an Xbox One seven years ago).
However, trying to write to Google Docs led to an error asking me to update my browser (if only possible) and the inability to write to the main compose window. However, the top menu on the site worked fine, so I could make a whole document by inserting web images and “special characters” one by one on the PS5 if I really wanted to.
Why is it hidden?
It may seem strange that Sony creates a decently functional web browser on the PS5 and then hides it where most users will never use it. It may seem especially strange since the PS4 featured a fully compliant web browser with a URL bar and quick access to “frequently used pages”. It seems even weirder when you notice that the PS5 system menu actually includes a “Web Browser” settings section where you can disable JavaScript, delete cookies, and “prevent cross-site tracking.”
That said, for Sony to upgrade the PS5 browser from its current “rickety interface for User Guide and web service logins” to “a full-featured browser that works reliably on the web” would probably require a decent amount of effort (and customer support). And Sony has recently suggested that making that effort is not a priority right now.
“Currently, we do not intend to include a web browser on PS5,” Sony Senior Vice President Hideaki Nishino said at a recent interview with the Japanese site AV Watch (as translated by Twitter user Nibel). “We have questions about whether a web browser is necessary for a game console as an application, so we will have to wait and see.”
(On Xbox One and S / X Series, third-party browsers like Monument can meet your browsing needs seamlessly.)
For now, if you are desperate to load a web page through your PS5 for whatever reason, the workaround discussed above will allow you to do so. But don’t be surprised if that’s the closest we get to official PS5 web browsing support in the near future.
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