Is there seriously no way to patch the web browser?

[Ondrashek06]

So the O3DS browser keeps being literally useless. Why? Well, because 99.99999% of the websites won't load, because the websites aren't backwards-compatible with the archaic protocols & standards that the O3DS browser uses. Literally the only website that worked for me was Google.

 

[The Catboy]

The hardware on the old3DS is kind of trash and support for the browser was always pretty bad. It’s honestly not worth working on when even Nintendo gave up on it and only started patching exploits.

 

[Ondrashek06]

The hardware on the old3DS is kind of trash and support for the browser was always pretty bad. It’s honestly not worth working on when even Nintendo gave up on it and only started patching exploits.

Okay, let me rephrase the question: Is there no homebrew way to patch the browser with an actually working one?

 

[The Catboy]

Okay, let me rephrase the question: Is there no homebrew way to patch the browser with an actually working one?

Not that I know of. I think most just focused on exploits and that’s really it

 

[Sono]

It's not possible to "patch" the old3DS browser, as there is nothing to patch.

I do mean that in the literal sense. It's so bad because it *lacks* functionality.

The reason it lacks functionality is due to lacking the necessary hardware to include that functionality (well, except for TLSv1.2 support, that's just lazyness on Nintendo's part).
For example, there is no HTML5 video support, as decoding a regular "web video" could be barely done in real time, but if you also had to resize it to fit the screen, that's already way too much processing power.
Other features are not enabled due to not having enough RAM available to the browser. I bet most websites you'd visit would fail to fully load due to running out of RAM.

To be honest, it's actually a miracle that there is a web browser for the old3DS which actually works *at all*.

 

[Ondrashek06]

It's not possible to "patch" the old3DS browser, as there is nothing to patch.

I do mean that in the literal sense. It's so bad because it *lacks* functionality.

The reason it lacks functionality is due to lacking the necessary hardware to include that functionality (well, except for TLSv1.2 support, that's just lazyness on Nintendo's part).
For example, there is no HTML5 video support, as decoding a regular "web video" could be barely done in real time, but if you also had to resize it to fit the screen, that's already way too much processing power.
Other features are not enabled due to not having enough RAM available to the browser. I bet most websites you'd visit would fail to fully load due to running out of RAM.

To be honest, it's actually a miracle that there is a web browser for the old3DS which actually works *at all*.

So that means that my 3DS is unusable to browse the internet, even if I managed to code a web-browser replacement for the 3DS? It doesn't even need to replace the actual applet, it could be just an app...

 

[lone_wolf323]

So that means that my 3DS is unusable to browse the internet, even if I managed to code a web-browser replacement for the 3DS? It doesn't even need to replace the actual applet, it could be just an app...

add in the widmfi card nintendo used. which is also bad. you will not be able to ever make proper use of the web browser. Very basic sites with not much to load will work. albeit not well. the 3ds is not a prime choice for internet browsing. and never will be.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

I'm surprised that the exceptionally stupid "Use your phone!!" reply didn't show up yet(?)

Websites nowadays don't go easy with the resources and I call this . Many site could work on low-end devices (and would be better for people with slow connections) if at least a bit attention was payed on less complexity – and not having a site embed and background scripts from 100 different trackers and the like.

Devices MUCH weaker (CPU, RAM) than O3DS could render websites "once upon a time".

Basic news sites making the laptop fan spin faster leave me stumped.


→ Yes, I agree. It would be nice to have a full-blown homebrew webbrowser running in extended memory mode (80MB) making the most of the 3DS. I guess theoretically mobile versions of some sites could be handled. But I'm not a developer.

 

[Sono]

So that means that my 3DS is unusable to browse the internet, even if I managed to code a web-browser replacement for the 3DS? It doesn't even need to replace the actual applet, it could be just an app...

Yes, no matter what browser engine you used. There is simply not enough hardware to back something as freely customizable (content) as a web browser.

Before you say that the internet has worked just fine on older phones with much less RAM: pretty sure mine could barely display more than three low-resolution image before the browser crashed, and I had to wait at least a minute to load a very simple page with links and buttons on it. As for a newer touchscreen phone running Symbian, it works as well as an old3DS... probably because it has very similar specs...

 

[AleronIves]

You could run a web browser with 64 MiB RAM 20 years ago, but modern HTML5 is so bloated that even if you wrote a custom web browser from scratch as O3DS homebrew, most web pages wouldn't display. Even if you could display them, it would probably take a long time for the O3DS's weak CPU to run the calculations necessary to figure out how to render the pages.

You can still use the O3DS browser to view websites written in plain HTML4 (or earlier), but any modern site with dynamic content isn't going to work.

 

[pokota]

All this talk makes me wonder if anybody tried porting Lynx to 3ds homebrew

 

[susbaconhairman]

and the wifi card is slow as hell too, I think I read somewhere that it caps off at about 2 mb/s

 

[Kwyjor]

All this talk makes me wonder if anybody tried porting Lynx to 3ds homebrew

eLinks and w3m are the new hotness as far as text-based browsing goes. Or so I understood.

 

[Sono]

and the wifi card is slow as hell too, I think I read somewhere that it caps off at about 2 mb/s

It's not the WiFi card's fault, actually.

There are actually multiple problems, but it's NOT the WiFi chip itself:
- The SDIO hardware has several quirks/bugs which decrease performance
- Nintendo's SD protocoll code is absolute garbage
- The architecture of the networking stack on the 3DS has way too many layers
- The amount of nested syscalls add up in wasted time, and you need a lot of them...
If you're wondering what SD has to do with WiFi, yes, the WiFi card is connected similarly like an SD card would.

Edit: but yes, I never got more than ~523kb/s on old3DS, and around 2.1Mb/s on new3DS.

Edit 2: just in case anyone is wondering, this is all the layers a simple network call has to travel through:
spider (old3DS browser)/SKATER (new3DS browser) --> soc (sockets) --> nwm (basically WiFi driver) --> sdio (SD driver for ARM11 side)

 

[CeeDee]

expecting a web browser to work well on a device that was already lower-end when it came out 11 years ago is a big ask, don't you think?

 

[CodyMKW]

I rather remove the whole browser on 3ds and make the browser icon load a local web page stored on sd card that local web page being the 3ds image share site

 

[theaxd]

ive been trying to figure out a way to update the certs on the web browser so atleast sites that rely on lets encrypt will load but i don't know how to achieve that. its really easy to edit the rootca.pem on the wii u web browser so why can't it be done on 3ds?

 

[Kwyjor]

I'd say a much bigger concern is the absolutely baffling lack of support in the New 3DS browser for "captive portals", thus making it nearly impossible to use a New 3DS with public wifi hotspots. What's up with that!? The old 3DS has a major advantage in that regard.

 

[kehkou]

I reader-based "text browser" would shine on an O3DS, cutting out trackers and flying past paywalls!