Oculus Browser Review

Oculus Browser is among the very first apps to launch on the Oculus Quest, which features another version of this browser known as ‘Oculus Go’. This browser comes pre-installed on both headsets, making it one of the most accessible browsers in terms of pure convenience.

Despite being made for virtual reality headsets, there are many things I would change about this browser.

For one, the browser’s UI is hard to search for many commonly used links, such as email addresses and phone numbers. It seems that if any link is too short or long in length, it will not work properly with Oculus Browser.

This sounds like a tiny issue, but when I was reviewing this browser, I tried to find a friend’s email address. I could not find it in the search bar and when I clicked on ‘Forgot your password?’ it went to a 404 page. When I searched again, another option popped up saying “not found”.

‘Oculus Browser’ also has a huge lack of customization options available for the user. For example, there is no way you can change website colors from their pre-installed blue color scheme – everything just looks bland and kind of similar.

In addition, when browsing websites requiring flash player or HTML 5 support, the video will still play but often times will be glitchy or choppy. This usually happens when scrolling down articles too quickly. Along with this issue, after clicking on videos, sometimes they won’t play at all. Once again, this is because of the lack of customization options that are available for this browser.

Lastly, when scrolling down websites with many advertisements or any website with large amounts of content in general, it takes a while for the graphics to load and show up. This can be considered another huge inconvenience for users who have already waited several minutes just to find out there’s too much content to load up properly.

When you go to search for something in Oculus Browser, there are no phone numbers listed – making it very inconvenient when trying to look up something simple like a telephone number.

For example, when I searched my friend’s email address (which I could not find) I expected to find an email-related link listed, but the only things I found were websites like LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Oculus Browser seems to be lacking many useful features in comparison with other browsers available for headsets, such as ‘VRChrome’, which has emoji support and better customization options than this application.

On the bright side, there are plenty of pre-installed websites that you can choose from when entering VR mode that work very well on this browser – even if some don’t have a proper search bar or HTML support.

In order to access more sites, it requires a Facebook account for verification purposes. After going through all of these steps you can finally surf the Internet within virtual reality! However, you must have patience with this browser because not all websites have been pre-loaded on Oculus Browser.

Also, some sites that are listed on the menu can be a bit glitchy and won’t play videos or load content properly. This is due to the lack of HTML 5 or Flash support that seems to cause these problems when scrolling down articles quickly.

To sum this review up, I would rate ‘Oculus Browser’ with 3/10 stars because it seems like an extremely bare-bones interface for virtual reality mode. The only good thing about this launcher is that there are no complicated steps needed in order to use it (like logging into your Facebook account), the UI is very simplistic, and there are plenty of websites you can visit without having much trouble. However, this also comes with a lack of customization options and large amounts of content will not load properly.

In contrast, I would rate ‘Oculus Bowser’ as an 8/10 because there are many customizable options available for you to play around with and it is still very easy to access some good websites from the list that has been pre-loaded onto their browser. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great product – it’s just not perfect.

I hope you found this article helpful! If you have any questions or comments you can leave them below 🙂

WordPress Cookie Notice by Real Cookie Banner