Next-gen consoles are coming. What does it mean for the web?
Sony and Microsoft have shown the PS5 and Xbox Series X. The hardware is impressive, but what we keep thinking about is the browser running on it. The living-room screen is about to become a real web target — and almost no brand site is ready.
Sony's revealed the PS5 specs. Microsoft has shown Project Scarlett, now Xbox Series X. The hardware story is obvious — more frames, more rays, more storage speed. The story we keep thinking about is the browser running on those boxes. Both consoles ship with a real web browser, both connect to TVs that are now the largest screens in most homes, and almost no brand site we've audited renders well on either.
Console specs, briefly
| PS5 (announced) | Xbox Series X (announced) | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Custom AMD Zen 2, 8-core | Custom AMD Zen 2, 8-core |
| GPU | Custom AMD RDNA, ~10 TFLOPS | Custom AMD RDNA 2, 12 TFLOPS |
| Memory | GDDR6, exact spec TBD | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Storage | Custom NVMe SSD | 1TB NVMe SSD |
| Ray tracing | Hardware-accelerated | Hardware-accelerated |
| Target launch | Holiday 2020 | Holiday 2020 |
Why the console browser matters
- 01Tens of millions of TVs with a real browser, a real GPU, and a real input device. That's a category most product teams have ignored entirely.
- 02Activation campaigns built for that screen — voting overlays, second-screen experiences, social tie-ins — are wide open.
- 03Web games are about to be playable on hardware that absolutely will not flinch. WebGL 2 on a PS5 GPU is genuinely impressive.
- 04Console browsers are increasingly Chromium-based. The fragmentation tax is lower than it has been.
- 05TV-shaped surfaces matter for brand experiences — connected events, live shopping, voting overlays.
Where we'd start
- 01Test your sites on the current PS4 / Xbox One browsers. If they look bad now, they'll look bad on the new ones too.
- 02Design for controller input. Hover states matter again — keyboard navigation matters more.
- 03Think 10-foot UI. Anything below 18px font-size on a TV is unreadable from the sofa.
- 04Test gamepad navigation with the Gamepad API. It's been stable in major browsers since 2015 and nobody uses it.
- 05Build colour-safe — TVs have very different gamma curves than monitors; subtle low-contrast UI disappears.
The 'living-room browser' is becoming a real category. The brand experiences that ship to TVs in 2021 will be the ones whose teams test on console in 2020. Everyone else will be retrofitting.
What we will not predict
- 01A flood of console-first websites. There is no business model.
- 02Brand sites suddenly redesigning for 10-foot UI. The audience doesn't justify it for most.
- 03Web games taking meaningful market share from native console games. WebGL is impressive; native game tooling is still a generation ahead.
- 04The console browser becoming a primary entry point to brand experiences. The TV browser remains a secondary surface for the foreseeable.
What we will predict
- 01'Living-room browser' becomes a real testing target for any brand experience that wants to be on every screen.
- 02Event-tied second-screen experiences — vote in the TV browser, see the result in the show — return as a category.
- 03Streaming overlays and channel companion sites get serious about 10-foot rendering.
- 04Big-brand campaigns start budgeting console-browser QA as a line item. Worth budgeting for it on big-brand projects starting in 2020.
We're not predicting a flood of console-first sites. We are predicting a quiet shift where 'living-room browser' becomes a real testing target for any brand experience that wants to be on every screen. The brands that take it seriously early will have measurably better viewer experiences when next-gen consoles land in twelve months.