Sony's System Software Development Needs Help

A quick rant about buggy software.
By Dustin Rudzinski - November 03, 2009
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We've all known that Sony wasn't the best at writing software for tasks like web browsing or media management for some time now. PS3's web browser has always been plagued with problems, from not being able to run many flash applications to crashing quite often. After many, many firmware updates, it is still quite a challenge to do something as simple as look up a song on myspace (You'll either see the player load but not work, or it'll say you need to update your flash player.), or even looking up Youtube videos. Today I tried showing a friend a video I'd posted, and after it finally loaded up the page, clicking on the search box to type in the search opened the text dialogue, then it shut itself down again before I could actually type anything in. This happened repeatedly (while I shouted out various four letter words) until I closed the browser, and restarted it. Only then would it finally let me search. It then crashed while browsing for another video afterwards, forcing me to reboot the PS3.

One would think after all these revisions, they would have gotten it right by now, but no dice. Maybe they should have Mozilla port firefox over, or even Google Chrome? Whatever works, just get rid of that dreadful buggy browser we have now. Facebook is unusable on this browser, which isn't good for Sony now that Microsoft is promoting the crap out of their broken Facebook/Twitter integration (I say broken, because you can't actually click on any links your friends post.). Even though PS3 lets you click on any link, the fact that the entire browser is broken craps on the otherwise huge advantage PS3 has over 360.

Then we have software like Media Go, which is also quite problematic. Installing the program can be a bit of a challenge, as in addition to having to install the program itself, which was a 70mb install, you also have to download Windows Media components, and Quicktime as well. Some have reported issues with the Quicktime install crashing and not allowing them to install Media Go. And if you're like me, and prefer to use Quicktime Alternative, you are out of luck. It's the real thing or nothing. The software is also quite slow when encoding video, and the encoder can crash on longer encodes. Syncing with your music library can be unreliable also. Many users on our forums have reported difficulty getting it to sync without crashing. In Media Go's defense, most users have reported that the newer versions are a dramatic improvement over the older ones, but it's still far from perfect.

Then we have the actual firmware that runs the PS3 itself... Where do we start here? It seems to be par for the course for every time a major firmware update is released, a patch is soon to follow. They just can't seem to get it right the first time. Last time we updated to 3.0, I was in the middle of a last minute run-through of Uncharted so I could snag my platinum trophy before Uncharted 2 launched. To my dismay, the game would randomly freeze and became unplayable at one point, constantly freezing at the same spot. It took 2 weeks of waiting for a fix to be released. Normally I would have brushed it aside, had it been the first time that had happened... but it wasn't.

We PS3 owners have become pretty used to poorly written software crashing our systems. They offer some of the best features in the industry, but it doesn't look good for them when you try to show those features off to your friends who want a PS3, and it crashes. If Sony would invest more time and money into developing their software, and take the time needed for proper quality control, they'd have quite an advantage of a solid hardware platform with solid software as well. While I'd much rather have a frequently crashing system than a system that melts down every 5 minutes, it can still be quite annoying trying to do the things PS3 is advertised to do, like writing a friend a Myspace message, without anything going wrong. So far the only piece of Sony software I've used that I have no complaints over as far as reliability goes is Sony Vegas Video editing software, and that's because it was built on the code that Sonic Foundry wrote when they designed Vegas before being bought out by Sony.

If Sony put as much into developing their non-gaming software as they did into their games, they'd be sitting on top of the world right now. Well... if they did that and also advertised what they did. It's amazing to see how many people there are that don't even know half of the features that are built into PS3. The "It only does everything" commercials are a good start, but there is much work to be done to get the word out. But before they do, they need to actually get those features working right. If my PS3 were a reliable web browser, that I knew wouldn't crash if I tried to do the most basic web tasks on it, my PC would only be used for editing video. It's just a real shame to see so much potential held back by some poorly written pieces of code. 


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