Apple TV Gets a Web Browser with New iPhone App… Kind Of

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web-browser-for-Apple-TV.jpg

A new iPhone application called Web Browser for Apple TV aims to… well… bring a web browser to your Apple TV.

From TapMedia, the $1.99 application uses AirPlay functionality with your Apple TV in a novel new way to display web pages on your television.

It has a few features that allow you to email page links, add bookmarks, view your history, and view files such as PDFs and Word documents. There’s also features a built-in search bar for quick and easy Googling.

Right now, version 1.0 could do with a little work. I really like the idea, but this application is far from perfect in its current state. I played around with it myself before writing this post and the first thing I noticed is how slow it is. Not on the iPhone – things there are relatively smooth – but the image displayed on the TV is very delayed. There’s also a few bugs: when clicking on links, 9 times out of 10 I got an error and the page refused to load:

Web Browser for Apple TV Error

This app requires a lot of new features to make it worthy of your two bucks – such as support for multitasking so that the connection to your Apple TV doesn’t die when you switch apps, and the ability to act as a different web browser so that you don’t just see mobile sites – but it’s a great idea and I hope it gets better.

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