Webbrowser
Introduction
The PlayStation Portable comes with a web browser for browsing the Internet. The web browser is a version of the NetFront browser made by Access Co. Ltd. and was released for free with the 2.00 system software update. The browser supports most common web technologies, such as HTTP cookies, forms, CSS, as well as basic JavaScript capabilities.
The version 2.50 upgrade added Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding and Auto-Select as options in the browser's encoding menu, and also introduced the saving of input history for online forms.
Version 2.70 of the PSP's system software introduced basic Flash capabilities to the browser. However, the player runs Flash version 6, five iterations behind the current desktop version 11, making some websites difficult to view.
There are three different rendering modes: "Normal", "Just-Fit", and "Smart-Fit". "Normal" will display the page with no changes, "Just-Fit" will attempt to shrink some elements to make the whole page fit on the screen and preserve layout and "Smart-Fit" will display content in the order it appears in the HTML, and with no size adjustments; instead it will drop an element down below the preceding element if it starts to go off the screen.
The browser also has limited tabbed browsing, with a maximum of three tabs. When a website tries to open a link in a new window, the browser opens it in a new tab.
Parents can limit content by enabling Browser Start Up Control which blocks all access to the web browser and creating a 4-digit PIN under [Settings] in [Security]. Additionally, the browser can be configured to run under a proxy server and can be protected by the security PIN to enable the use of web filtering or monitoring software through a network. Recently, TrendMicro for PSP was added as a feature that can be enabled via a subscription to filter or monitor content on the PSP.
The PSP browser is slower compared to modern browsers and often runs out of memory due to limitations put in place by Sony. Alternatively, Homebrew has allowed a custom version of the browser to be released that utilizes all 32/64 MB of the PSP's RAM, which allows the browser to load pages faster and have more memory for larger pages. Opera Mini can also be used on PSP through PSPKVM, a homebrew application which is a Sun Java Virtual Machine. It was claimed to provide much faster loading times than the default browser and provides better web page compatibility.
Opera Mini Browser
There are two different web browsers that are available on the Sony PSP. One is only accessible using homebrew and the other is Sony's official web browser (owb). Since Sony has included theirs on the PSP since ofw 2.00, I am going to describe now the faster one and more web page friendly version.
For this you will need to download two things:
- PSPKVM http://pspkvm.soft112.com/
- Opera Mini http://mini.opera.com/global/opera-mini-4.0.10406-advanced-int.jar
PSPKVM is a homebrew java program that allows you to run programs that have the .jar extension, as of version 0.3.2 there is an on screen keyboard (osk), thus allowing for easy web browsing. Opera Mini is a web browser that is designed for cell phones.
Installation
- Download PSPKVM and copy it to your ms0:/PSP/GAME folder. It was programmed in a country other than the US so if you are used to using X for enter and O for cancel, the buttons are switched.
- Download Opera Mini, Copy the .jar file to ms0:/PSP/GAME/PSPKVM/Apps. You will have to create that path yourself.
- Launce PSPKVM and click on "Find Application" and browse to the Opera mini location and click on it. When asked to select a device, use "J2ME Standard (480*272)"
Usage
The osk will pull up for almost everything, except the web address entry on the main page. This is easy to get around by just clicking on google and searching for the webpage that you want.
There are a bunch of usefull built-in features:
- RSS Feeds
- Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary, Ebay, Amazon, and IMDB searches
- Bookmarks
- History
- Zoom in/out features
It can load many pages that the owb can't, including the ability to log into ebay and gmail.