World of Warcraft to get an in-game browser in patch 5.3, sort of
Coming to WoW in patch 5.3 is an in-game web browser, sorta. We've known for a bit that there's been datamined content that has been pointing to an in-game browser, and today it was announced on Blizzard's official blog that it's a feature coming in patch 5.3. While the press release says "feature-limited," it's a bit more drastic really -- you cannot access any content outside of the battle.net domain, at all. Any links to places like Wowhead or WoW Insider get opened in an external browser.
You can load up the patch 5.3 PTR and access the tool for yourself if you'd like to try it out -- but it is rather underwhelming in its current state. There's not much to do but browse support information; which is helpful sometimes (although the times that I've had to use the support site, I usually haven't been able to get into WoW in the first place).
There is no indication if Blizzard will open up external domains later on.
We've gone to great lengths to improve our website support systems and we want to offer access to all of its robust features in-game. The new browser will make it it easier to find information to help you resolve issues you're experiencing or contact our representatives if you need a little extra help.
We will test this new feature in the 5.3 public test realm (PTR), and we'd like your assistance. Adding a web browser in-game is a new venture for us, and we need you to test it by searching through the support knowledge base and pages to make sure that it holds up in various hardware and network situations. It's important to note that while we will be testing the functionality of this feature within the PTR, we are unable to process support ticket submissions.
To help test and provide feedback, copy your character and download the PTR client.
We'd appreciate your feedback and testing reports to be put into the below forum thread so we can collect and respond to any errors or issues you're seeing.
