BROWSEEEEEEEEER and home screen themes

Soo, long story short is the server had not been updated in a while, and so when a few innocuous looking plugins upgraded, a lot of other stuff broke.

Now the forums themselves are upgraded to a newer version, and should be easier to upgrade in the future. This also means some old bugs are fixed (like the account deletion one), and some other stuff might look different.

Requested by @ForgetMeNot49, the browseDNS IPs do not currently support "disable DNS" like Switchbru DNS does (eg. from http://lanechange-controller.fortheusers.org/manage/ ).

Oh jeez, hi, working on it now.

We got to 15k signatures!... And change.org accordingly updated the goal:

I knew they'd give us another goal (really, the goal is "always" just "more" signatures...) but it still just says "becomes one of the top signed", which I guess will never stop being false.

Thanks anyway everyone! I may post an update to the petition within the week. I'm hoping to get to the point where other sites start covering the petition to increase the public pressure on Nintendo to add a real browser.

I should also note that the browser is powered by NetFront, which is maintained by Access Co Ltd. Maybe it's worth sending some love / attention their way as well.

I don't know what kind of deal they have with Nintendo, but it seems straightforward enough to imagine that there's potential revenue they're missing out on by not being a fully fledged browser app.

This is a cool channel with lots of Majora's Mask (and other games) ambiance / cutscenes.

by Cirquet on youtube

This repo appears to allow for some web inspector / debugging tools through DNS + PC, but it may not work on latest firmware. I have not checked yet: https://github.com/sudofox/switch-browser

Depending on what the actual issues are with Discord, it may be possible to get it working (in the normal DNS browser applet) by injecting javascript into the page that attempts to fix whatever the loading issues are.

So there's two main problems with that, the first is: how do you actual inject the JS? It is technically doable via DNS override to bypass CORS restrictions, however there will be an HTTPS security issue. That though, can also be bypassed by the user (It will prompt and say page is insecure, but in login applet you can accept this warning and load the page anyway). This part is technically doable, even if it's a little flakey.

The next problem is discovering what the actual issues preventing Discord from loading in the first place even are. If it's like, some newer javascript method that just needs to be polyfilled, there would be a pretty decent chance of success. But as of this time of writing, I don't even know where to start debugging that. You would need something like a webkit developer console / inspector that's accessible via Homebrew. Again, it should be possible to debug these issues (something like BrowseNX -> web inspector for instance) just not sure where to start.

Finally there's likely to be a third issue with something like, the page size being too large for memory. This too however potentially be patched via custom JS as well, to try to keep in-memory size low. This is another area where custom homebrew or emulating the web applet on PC would be useful to debug what the custom JS looks like.

From a user perspective, injecting "custom JS" like this is just essentially just acting as a browser extension, besides the part where you load it insecurely from overridden DNS settings. Disclaimer: this is all hypothetical!

tldr: 1. it's possible to inject custom scripts (aka "browser extensions") over DNS + accept security warning without homebrew, so 2. technically may be able to patch whatever issues there are with discord. But 3. need to figure out what those issues are in the first place, in order to know what to patch (which 4. may need custom homebrew or an emulator to debug).

zutara

@NoahAbc12345 @lollapalooza Thank you both!

It's crazy how much traction that particular video got. Kotaku covered it, and I got to talk about the reasoning behind the hack.

Also here's the video @lollapalooza was referring to!

It is cool if you have the time/interest, and a hackable Switch! But it may not be an option for most people.

We did some tests in another thread: https://browsedns.net/topic/25/browser-timeout-this-screen-will-be-closed/34?_=1654097213810

TLDR: Every 3 seconds it checks to see if the browser should be dismissed, and after 400 of these checks (so 400*3/60 = 20 minutes) it dismisses. The checks do not occur while in sleep mode, but that isn't really that useful.

The best advice is probably to add more custom "useful links" on Switchbru Dashboard via computer, to then visit them faster on your Switch, just to spend as little time searching and maximize usage time.

If you plug in a USB keyboard, either via usbc or through the dock USB ports, it Just Works! Makes using the browser a lot easier, and combined with the dock + controller makes for a decent computer-like experience.

Unfortunately a mouse doesn't seem to do anything.

@mmninja92 I'll try to bring this back today. After the DNS outage, that feature stopped working, so I removed the button until I could debug further.

I used to use puppy linux on a very old computer, but that may be extreme

Yep, here is some technical info about why it doesn't work via the DNS: https://browsedns.net/topic/359/browser-applets-and-why-videos-don-t-work?_=1653065903752

And a workaround for videos on Twitter via the social applet: https://browsedns.net/topic/558/videos-sent-through-twitter-somehow-work-on-the-switch-browser/1?_=1653066005506

It would have to be a self-signed cert. Let's encrypt wouldn't (and shouldn't!) issue one for the discord.com domain, since the overridden-via-DNS server wouldn't be able to prove it owns the domain.

There used to be a website called Discross, but it seems no longer alive: https://gbatemp.net/threads/discross-access-discord-from-switch.545031/

I never looked at the specific issue that Discord has when loading on the Switch– it may be possible that patching some files via a custom DNS server could be doable, although it would require explicitly trusting an invalid https certificate for the domain.

@Spaghetti_Man Videos will work in the Social applets (like on Twitter or Facebook), however they do not support navigating to other websites on the Internet.

See here for a workaround for viewing videos on Twitter: https://browsedns.net/topic/558/videos-sent-through-twitter-somehow-work-on-the-switch-browser?_=1652537732375

Also in that thread is the explanation of the different applets, and how the Social one is different from the DNS one.