In the run-up to the Xbox One's launch this year, one of the more amusing stories was a Microsoft blog post suggesting that users could mark the system as a tax write-off if they used things like Skype chatting and Microsoft Office online for business purposes. It seemed silly, but it got me wondering: Could the Xbox One and some Web-based apps fill in for the desktop or laptop I usually use for my day-to-day work?

After using it in just that way for the better part of a day, I was surprised to find that the Xbox One's version of Internet Explorer lets the system serve as a halfway decent work machine—though not without a good deal of headaches and missing features. It wouldn't take many tweaks for Microsoft to really unlock the Xbox One's potential for productivity, letting the company market the box in earnest as a living room computer in addition to a high-end game machine.

Getting to work

My extremely janky living room work setup. Note the Xbox One controller sitting on my legs as a de facto mouse.

As a writer, being able to type on the Xbox One was the first and most absolute basic requirement for using it as a work machine. Using the on-screen keyboard was out of the question, and using a Smartglass-powered tablet touchscreen for text entry seemed like cheating. Luckily, the Xbox One seems to have no issues accepting input from a USB keyboard as long as that keyboard is plugged in before you turn the system on from a hard reset.

I'm using a wired keyboard, but I've heard reports that wireless keyboards with a USB receiver work just as well for those that want to type while they recline on the couch. It doesn't look like you can use the keyboard to navigate system menus or control any games, but it works great for typing in URLs and text for Web-based forms (like those in the Ars Technica Content Management System that I'm typing in right now for instance).

Unfortunately, the USB compatibility doesn't extend to mice as far as I can tell. This is kind of surprising since the Xbox One version of Internet Explorer uses a virtual pointer controlled by the left analog stick on the standard controller, complete with a decent scroll wheel function controlled by the right analog stick. It would seem trivial to add in some browser-level code to replace these controller inputs with the input from a standard USB mouse. Some sort of Kinect-based, hand-waving pointer wouldn't seem out-of-place either, given how much Microsoft has talked up the power of the included camera (limited voice controls only work so well when trying to navigate complex webpages and tabs).

As it stands, I've propped the controller nearby and use the analog sticks as de facto pointer nubs to move around webpages. It's a major annoyance that really puts a damper on the whole "Xbox One as work machine" experience, but it isn't an impassable road block to getting things done.

My first order of business, as it is most work mornings, was loading up my work e-mail. Both my Gmail account and an Outlook-based corporate account loaded quickly and accurately through their Web-based interfaces and were easily legible sitting about six feet away from my 40-inch HDTV (there are a couple of zoom levels that help for tiny text boxes and the like). The pages scroll smoothly, and there's a nice acceleration effect on that annoying controller pointer that allows for precise clicking.

Loading up Gmail also gives me access to GChat through the in-browser overlay over my e-mail, which I used to check in with my editors and fellow writers ("Hello from my Xbox One, I'm trying to work from here today." "You're WHAT?"). It's not as nice as the Trillian chat client that I'm used to on my other computers, but it's perfectly functional and it let me carry on a few conversations (and even field a tip from a colleague) all while browsing my e-mail.

At this point, I was a little surprised. I'm so used to the limited, slow, buggy, hard-to-use, perfunctory Web browsers in most modern game consoles that I was genuinely shocked when the Xbox One could handle complex, interactive, HTML5- and AJAX-filled pages without any issues. Building on top of the Internet Explorer base really seems to have paid off in a full-featured experience.

The problems begin

This was the best generalized picture of the Xbox One I could get into this post using nothing but consoles. Read on to find out why.

The next step in my morning is logging on to the Ars Editors IRC chat room, and today Ars' Andrew Cunningham suggested I try out Mibbit for a good Web-based solution. It's here that I ran into the first big missing feature of my day: the lack of a robust copy-and-paste feature in the browser. This was an immediate issue because I had to get the randomly generated IRC channel password out of my e-mail and into Mibbit if I wanted to log in to the chat channel.

Even though I could select the text with the controller, there was no menu option I could find to put the highlighted text into a system-level clipboard. I tried Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V on my keyboard, but there was similarly no response. I eventually relented and ended up transferring the password to notebook paper and back onto the screen, but it took me way too long to figure out that I had mistaken an "O" character for a zero in this process.

(Random aside: Though Ctrl-Z doesn't work as a reflexive "undo typing" command, I accidentally discovered that hitting the escape key serves the same function. Other keyboard shortcuts like Home, End, PgUp and PgDn, Ctrl-A to select all, and Ctrl-arrow to skip through words all worked just fine. I also noticed that hitting the PrtSc key on my keyboard causes the browser to hang for a solid second or two, making me wonder where exactly that copied screenshot is being stored...)

This situation was made all the odder when I found later that the Xbox One browser does allow me to copy text, but only when it's found in the address bar of a tab. I can hit Ctrl-C on the keyboard when selecting a URL in the address bar, then hit Ctrl-V to paste that URL (or text) anywhere I want. That means there is some sort of clipboard functionality buried in the browser currently, but Microsoft hasn't activated it for generalized text as of yet for some reason.

This seems like a trivial feature to add at this point, and one that would make Internet Explorer on Xbox One much more useful from a productivity standpoint. As it is, I didn't really realize how much I used copy/paste in the course of my day until I was forced to go without it on the Xbox One (though being able to copy URLs at least gave me the ability to insert random links into stories).

Moving back from IRC to Gmail, I found another issue with transitioning my normal workflow to the Xbox One: multitasking. Instead of storing the Gmail tab in memory, the browser simply reloads the page when I tab back over to it using the controller. The minor delay isn't a huge issue, but the fact that I have to manually restore any GChat windows I had open is much more frustrating. To make matters worse, I find I have to re-enter my IRC password into Mibbit every time I tab back over to that page. Who thought trying to do work on an Xbox One was a good idea, again? (Oh, right, no one did.)

Of course, this also means that the GChat tab has no way to alert me if and when a new message comes in while I'm working on something else, which is practically the entire point of using it in the first place. I could solve this problem by using the Xbox One's built-in Skype program; text messages I receive there appear as pop-ups that let me switch over to the Skype app immediately to respond. I don't usually use Skype for anything but voice and video calls, though, so no one knows to message me there. I suppose we could one day see native Xbox One apps for competing chat protocols, but given Microsoft's ownership and support of Skype, I don't see this happening any time soon.

Grabbing images on the PS4



A picture of the Pac-man ghosts that guard my TV, taken with my PlayStation camera, just because I could.

Aside from these issues, I found many of my other daily tasks were surprisingly doable on the Xbox One. I can scan through Feedly and Twitter for news and links, watch videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and even download and edit an e-mailed Word document using SkyDrive storage and the online version of Microsoft Office (though downloading ZIP files is out of the question). Things like editing videos and transcribing audio interviews were pretty much out of the question, but these aren't everyday occurrences for me.

It was annoying to manage all of my work tasks on different full screen tabs, which often had to be reloaded each time I came back to them. I found myself missing my the dual-monitor setup in my office, which lets me scan Twitter, type an e-mail, watch a video, and download a massive screenshot dump all at once. You'd think the Xbox One's "snap" functionality would help a bit with this kind of multitasking, but you can't snap a second Internet Explorer window to the side when one is already running in the main window (and Skype can't be snapped at all).

The one unavoidable sticking point, as far as my work went, was image handling. Practically every post we write here at Ars Technica has some sort of image in it, usually taken from a camera or a webpage, then edited and cropped on a local machine and uploaded to our CMS. None of that is possible on the Xbox One.

I can take videos using the system's DVR function, but there's no way I can find to take screenshots of games or webpages or to snap still images from the Kinect. Similarly, I can view pictures that are already uploaded to my SkyDrive storage, but I can't figure out any way to upload images to that storage through the Xbox One itself (even if I could, there's no easy way to get them from SkyDrive into the Ars CMS). What's more, all the Web-based image editors I tried didn't seem to work on the Xbox One; they either required flash or they choked on importing images from the Web or Facebook.

To solve this problem, I had to bend the rules a little and move over to the PlayStation 4 (hey, I'm still working on a game console, right?) That system also has a Web browser that allows for a lot of the same productivity features being discussed here. Working on the PS4 this way is much less enjoyable though, thanks to extremely choppy webpage scrolling, extremely slow pointer movement, slightly less webpage compatibility, and occasional memory issues when too many tabs are open on the PS4 browser.

(Another odd aside: the PS4 explicitly acknowledges when I plug in a USB mouse, going so far as to ask me which user will be operating it, but it still doesn't let me use that mouse to control the Web browser's pointer. I guess if you're not controlling a first-person shooter, Sony doesn't think a mouse is all that useful.)

Despite all that, the PS4 does have the ability to upload generalized screenshots to Facebook or Twitter, which gives me a backdoor to get pictures into posts like this one. The pictures you see here were uploaded to Facebook using the PS4's Share button, then inserted into the post by linking directly to the URL in Facebook's CDN (not quite as bad as leaching off some random Web server, as far as I'm concerned). The picture of my living room work environment was taken using the PlayStation camera through the built-in Playroom app, giving me a handy way to get pictures of my real world environment without using a phone, tablet, webcam, or dedicated digital camera.

It's far from a perfect system (I still haven't found a way to edit these images on a console, for instance), but it does technically work. And that's about the best you can say for using the Xbox One as a work machine at this point: it works, but it's a major hassle. That's not that surprising, since the system was designed for games and entertainment and not for getting things done. In fact, it's more surprising that the system's support for Web-based productivity apps is as robust as it is.

If Microsoft added in mouse support, a copy-paste function, some better Web-based multitasking and memory management, as well as more explicit support for photos and file uploading and downloading, the console could really serve as a decent, Chromebook-style work machine that happens to be attached to you HDTV. The real question is whether Microsoft will (or should) bother to invest time and effort into these kinds of features.