Starting yesterday, a new update is available on Xbox One. I really love the new dashboard and the Xbox 360 backward compatibility as a gamer. But as a web developer, I’m more than happy to now have Microsoft Edge running on my console! This means that you can now run very modern content inside the Xbox One browser!

Testing your HTML5 content on Xbox One / MS Edge

It supports for instance WebGL, Web Audio, Gamepad API as you can see in this video:

We’re using the Babylon.js Mansion demo on the Xbox One. It runs perfectly fine! I’m still amazed by the beauty of the web standards. If you’re following best practices, your code will run everywhere! Even better, I’m using the Xbox Windows Store app in this video to stream the video output of my Xbox One on my Windows 10 PC. This mean that I can test my web content on my Xbox One without leaving my chair 😉

Thanks to the Xbox Windows Store app, you can remotely test the MS Edge Xbox One browser from your Windows 10 PC!

Playing to the WebGL Babylon.js Flight Arcade demo on Xbox One!

Remote debugging your HTML5 content on Xbox One thanks to Vorlon.js

Vorlon.js is an open-source cross-platforms remote debugging tool that has been made to easily remote debug any web page from any device. Let’s check that together in the following video:

By simply adding a single script reference at the beginning of your HTML page, you can remote debug your site from any browser using the Vorlon.js dashboard. In this video, I’m checking the support for the Gamepad API using the Modernizr plug-in, using the interactive console to check for potential errors and to execute JavaScript on the Xbox One and finally the DOM Explorer to update the HTML and some Flexbox properties. Again, using the Xbox Windows Store app is very useful to live debug the page. Simply snap it on the left and snap the Vorlon.js dashboard on the right. Even better, use multiple screens on your Windows 10 PC:

I’m definitely more than convinced that Web Standards and WebGL offer great new possibilities for the gaming industry! I’ve talked about this in a previous article: The web: the next game frontier? It seems to really start to be true. 😉

David