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1) Is there any way to develop for the Xbox 360 using HTML5/JavaScript? It can be either fully browser-based, a server hosted application, or a native C#/C++ Silverlight wrapper over HTML5/JavaScript code (like UiWebView on iPhone or WebView on Android/Google TV). I have no experience with this platform, so please accept my apologies for what might be obvious questions.

2) Does anybody know how powerful the Xbox HTML/JavaScript/CSS rendering engine is? Is it Webkit based?

Xenon
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STeN
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    Nothing from Microsoft is based on products outside Microsoft, unless they buy it. No WebKit there, probably Trident. And XBox is Microsoft. – tomsseisums Apr 12 '12 at 11:58

2 Answers2

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  1. Unless you have access to some NDA development tools that the rest of us don't know about, I can confidently say that there is no way to develop for the Xbox 360 platform using HTML5/Javascript/CSS.

    If you have access to the professional development tools, perhaps, but that's all under NDA. You'd need to refer to the documentation and the information on the developer portal.

    You might be able to build some sort of rendering implementation using the XNA Framework, but that'd be a lot of work. (See also: this Stack Overflow answer)

  2. Due to the NDAs surrounding Xbox 360 development, we simply don't know. If there is a rendering engine, it's almost certainly trident-based (and definitely not using Webkit).

Community
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Xenon
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  • You might also note that there has been some speculation of a Silverlight implementation for the Xbox 360, but no confirmation has been made by Microsoft. – Xenon Apr 14 '12 at 21:16
  • Hi Xenon, so to understand that - there is no HTML/CSS/JavaScript support in XNA framework and unless someone port Webkit to XBox (http://gpl.ea.com/skate3.html) or Microsoft will add Silverlight support, which might come with some WebView components (see here: http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-may-announce-silverlight-for-xbox-next-week/), we are out of luck? Thx! – STeN Apr 15 '12 at 02:13
  • Yeah, unfortunately that's the way it is. – Xenon Apr 15 '12 at 02:35
  • Pretty bad:( Thanks for support – STeN Apr 15 '12 at 02:40
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The Xbox 360 web browser is based on Internet Explorer 9, and includes all of its relevant CSS animation and ES5 JavaScript features, including support for video and audio. The amazing HTML5 Fishbowl demo developed by Microsoft to show off GPU-accelerated, simultaneous CSS transforms, MPEG-4 video decoding, and MP3 audio playing, runs beautifully on the Xbox 360 at 60fps. The Xbox 360 browser also has Flash 9 support (as does PS3 browser), so some HTML5 features like WebSocket and others can by polyfilled with open source flash components. From there, you can use webpack (or similar tool) to create a JavaScript bundle specific to this vintage (~2012) of browsers.

Some demonstrations of advanced media benchmarks, all of which have sources available, running on Xbox 360:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6TPdvKermw

https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/performance/fishbowl/

The XBox One browser is almost identical to the Edge 15 browser in Windows 10 Creators Update, which even has support for ES7 and Web Workers, except that:

  1. JavaScript JIT optimization is disabled, so throughput-based benchmarks (like Octane) won't perform as well. FishGL.com and other more real-world benchmarks still perform very well.

  2. Input tags relating to local file system access are disabled.

  3. Bizarrely, WebRTC/ObjectRTC is disabled on the Xbox One version of Edge.

Matt Hargett
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