Nintendo Switch unfortunately lacks a proper web browser which makes it impossible for users to watch videos on it, or perform other simple tasks like visiting a website. Fortunately, there is a trick to make the console open a website for performing various tasks and it seems to work fine at launch.
The trick involves the use of ‘Web Applet’ which is basically a Web Browser that offers the functionality of logging into a hotspot for online access on the Nintendo Switch. To perform this trick and access other websites or browse YouTube, you will have to open such a Web Applet.
Once you are able to access the Web Applet on your Nintendo Switch, you can trick the system into letting you access other websites although the functionality right now is fairly basic and doesn’t work correctly in some cases resulting in weird encoding issues.
The other way to do it is by going into the User Settings and then scrolling down to check the Social option that allows user to link their Facebook and Twitter accounts. This allows the user to access the whole Facebook or Twitter using a loophole on their Nintendo Switch. We can even play the videos on Facebook and they seem to work fine.
Perhaps this functionality right now hints at a potential system software update post-launch that might add a functional web browser to the Nintendo Switch.
One of the interesting discovery made by a user on reddit today shows that the current browser is basically an updated version of the browser featured on the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS. This just adds more credibility to a potential fully functional browser being added later down the line for Nintendo Switch.
