Mr G

Hello Newbie, Yes the WebOs browser is a stripped down browser with very little functionality beyond basic tv watching. You would think a big company like LG would either create a full-functioning browser or at least offer Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer on their App offering. I suspect the management team is disfunctional, with aging senior workers who do not understand modern tech. Companies like this make a decision one Tuesday morning then for the next ten years keep repeating the same old mistakes until the CEO dies or retires. The salesmen in the shop do not tell you that WebOs does not download, does not have right-click functions, tab browsing, home pages, or private browsing and is extremely slow. They also require clients to forgo all privacy rights as a condition of using the browser - while also preventing customers from using any other browsers. There is a law-suit right there. We unfortunately are stuck with this toy until we upgrade and we would never buy an LG tv ever again (Unless they change their policy mmm).

Well Basketball Jones, sure contact NBA and so on. In reality though the lads at LG should just setup a decent browswer for people to use. So it is not the responsibility of every website in the world to make an app for webOs but the responsibility of lg to make an app that has genuinely useful and I would have thought fairly basic features. That way you could not only watch NBA, but also millions of other sites that require basic functionality. Frankly I am appalled that a commercially available web browser does not have a download function. George's comments aside what were they thinking? Friday drinks? 🙂

We note the thread was hijacked diverting attention away from the silly browser to some other matter. As for George well George it appear you are saying since mobile apps are dumbed-down that means WebOS should be dumbed-down. I would disagree. This is 2018. We watch all our tv content, movies, news, research and email on the internet and long ago dropped using aerials and set-top boxes and the like. So while people in advanced countries use televisions for the kardazhians, cnn and ads, we use the screen for work, study and the like. The LG browser is simply not up to scratch.

Yes George, I have noticed this before when I have tried to report buggy software, errors or oversights in design of various products. People respond in various ways. Some hijack the thread and change the subject. Some just reply with sarcasm and insults - without actually offering anything useful to the discussion. Most people are genuinely helpful though and I always appreciate that thank you George. Other times you have a company employee who defends the company's position and seeks to minimise the importance of the original complaint, or to diminish the problem is some way. Not sure what your role is here George, but assuming you are not working for the man I can just respond as I see it. When you wrote "Hosted apps enables the content provider to update as often as they like without the need to have it retested and posted in the app store by LG." what you are talking about is some sort of convenience for the company. Notice you do not mention the customer. As you would have it the company wants to do something and they are not really thinking about the customer experience. Most of the apps that I have attempted to use on my phones for example, are must dumb-downed versions of the original webpage or application. whereas the original page or program had extensive preparation prior to release, that was old-school. The apps on the other hand appear to be written by a teenager fresh out of high-school. Many of the phone apps I used were just plain unusable. The would seize, crash, or have only a minimum of controls. All of which as I see it designed to force us the consumer sheep to just accept whatever slack coding the company allowed on its servers before 1, the team went on a break or 2, the CEO bought a holiday home with a boat. I need to use a web browser for my job and if LG wants to dumb down its products that does not help me at all. I thought I might try contacting the forum just to test the waters but apart from your lengthy replies justifying the poor-quality app no joy so far. That just leaves me with returning the tv and moving to another brand. If as you say LG does not think it is important for a keyboard to have a 'delete' button, or for browsers to have a 'download' function, the ability to open and scroll through multiple tabs, to display facebook properly or use schoolboy-level HTML for its media player, to run Netflix, used by hundreds of millions of people, I can only ascribe it I wrote earlier to two possible things: 1. The company is a little backwater operation with a handful of staff employing extremely limited and basic coding skills and software design, or 2. management knows that their 'app' is rubbish and they just have a cavalier 'we do not care about you or your needs' approach because 'our sales figures are up and the company is posting a profit. Bye' 😞 So George the issue is not whether the company uses flash, silverlight, html5 or some other system, it is about the customer experience and in my case this silly little excuse for a browser is frankly pathetic. As I wrote earlier it surprises me that some workers have a Tuesday morning management meeting and decide to omit most of the useful features of a browser, without having someone else in the room to challenge their hasty and ill-conceived ideas. There will of course always be employees who, having made bad decisions, will then hide behind a wall of technical jargon, blame others for errors in the app, or just resign and move on to another role in the company, after the damage is done. Given the propensity of these companies to make their developers unreachable and immune from customer feedback I hold out little hope, in this particular case for an actual solution to my original post. As for what you call the 'immense' task of rewriting the code in the browser to to play Netflix content it is not immense at all, just a few lines of code. Why not look at Firefox for example?

Hi George, Thank you. So is it the WebOS developers or the Netflix guys? Your responses: 1. " just code in the browser ID string " Who codes? Me? The WebOs team? 2. You would think a worldwide corporation with millions of customers [Hundreds of millions?] would be able to write lines of HTML. It is not that hard. 🙂 3. Flash too. George. We just bought the tv. Then we realise we have been forced to use their browser. Their privacy policy basically says we have no privacy whatsoever and never will, they can watch, record, sell everything we do forever. I suppose the gloves are off in the game of big brother. Looking closer at the browser there does not seem to any 'right'click' function so we cannot use tabs, for example. Facebook renders impossibly huge on the screen with the content displayed at full width. Is there another way to browse the internet? The developers are either incompetent or like I wrote earlier the gloves are off, management designed this deliberately, they do not care about complaints and they are out for blood. So any other ways to browse?

Thank you George. Yes YouTube runs fine but oddly not Netflix. I would have thought Netflix uses HTML5 for its browser and WebOS would display HTML5. No big deal just that we use the browser for everything else, email, YouTube, News channels, so we have simply got used to using Netflix from within the browser. Plus we have found Apps usually have limited functions, less security and more bugs so we avoid them. I would not want to get into a protracted discussion about whether to use apps or browser, just wondering, as you do, why a widely-used service such as Netflix would not work on a fairly-widely-used Operating System like WebOs and would there just be some simple setting that we are not aware of to enable Netflix to play content without leaving the browser.

We want to watch netflix on the browser not the app. The login page appears but when we click on the Play button a screen appears talking about HTML5 and Silverlight. We know what HTML5 and Silverlight are but find it strange that the WebOS browser does not support this markup language on its player. Oddly YouTube works fine in the browser. Does anybody know how to get the WebOS browser to run HTML5?