Xbox Labs Revives the Xbox 360 Blades Dashboard Inside a PC Browser

Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has shown off the classic Xbox 360 Blades dashboard running inside a web browser on a PC. It's one of the first public experiments from the newly formed Xbox Labs team. The short clip also shows the later New Xbox Experience (NXE) and the Metro-style dashboard, and all three look fully navigable. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who announced Xbox Labs last week with Van Vliet in charge, shared the clip with a simple question: "Blades on web. Do we like this experiment?" There's no word on Blades officially coming back to Xbox consoles, and this is very much an experiment for now.

It's not the first time Sharma has floated the idea. Shortly after taking over as CEO earlier this year, she asked fans whether Xbox should bring Blades back. Interestingly, the browser's address bar in the video appears to show FFFE07D1, the Title ID of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That hints Microsoft may be running actual 360 system software through some kind of emulation or translation layer, though Xbox hasn't said how any of this works. Xbox Labs was set up to experiment with how games are built and played, partly in response to the recent wave of AI-assisted ports, so a browser-based approach would fit that brief. Microsoft has already brought original Xbox games to PC, so a proper Xbox 360 push on PC no longer seems far-fetched.