The following information comes from an interview with Nintendo director Munetaka Tsuda and front-end engineer Yuji Horikawa...
- Switch uses many web-related technologies
- it has a browser component based on WebKit
- this can be used as a browser component from games and software in the console
- Switch’s browser can be used to link with smartphones
- posting captured screenshots and videos to social media also uses web-related links
- Switch uses the browser client to send image and text data to an interim server in the cloud
- some content pages in games use web features like HTML and CSS
- Switch can perform a seamless switch between native and web
- the team's vision was to “connect games with users worldwide”
- smartphone apps like Nintendo Switch Parental Controls and Nintendo Switch Online also use web features
- the smartphone and PC versions of the Switch eShop have many similarities in coding as they use a responsive feature
- the architecture for the entire eShop is unified under React as a basis
- development of the eShop began at the end of 2015
- the keyword “immediately” is something that was stressed
- they wanted content to be immediately visible, immediately purchasable, and immediately improvable
- as there are too many games, it would be too tiresome to set the background color of each game page one by one
- Nintendo devised their own algorithm to automatically determine the dominant background color for a game
- in early development, there was a gap in perception about components between designers and engineers/programmers
- this caused a problem earlier on, which was solved by creating a mockup of the eShop in HTML and CSS
- the eShop gets very complex due to country/region, language, laws, currencies, payment method, and more
- Nintendo used multiple testers from all over the world to set things right
- when they tried combining everything from the OS to the web and run them all at once on the Switch, it was unstable and slow
- the team gathered all staff to cooperate and collect solutions to fix this problem
- engineers and programmers worked to optimize the system
- there was also work on the boot animation to reduce stress in user waiting time
from GoNintendo
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