Unique NXE Avatar URLs discovered

Posted Oct 21st 2008 12:45PM by Richard Mitchell
Filed under: News

An anonymous tipster has informed Xbox 360 Fanboy that Avatars -- the cute, customizable user characters that will launch with the New Xbox Experience -- will each have their own unique URL (which won't open in Firefox or Safari, by the way). The URLs in question lead to PNG files of a users Avatar. The URLs lead to images of at least three sizes, as demonstrated in the image above. The Avatars belong to Microsoft's Trixie and Chris Paladino by the way (we tried plugging in one of our own gamertags and were greeted with nothing but the original Xbox logo). There is a full body image along with two smaller images of user created Avatar Gamerpics. All of them are stored at the site avatar.xboxlive.com, which currently leads to a blank page. Will these images be part of a broader social networking platform? For now, we'll just have to wait until Microsoft decides to share more about the NXE.

That sucks, I thought they were just joking about not allowing firefox, but I just got a page full of symbols when I tried to go there.. Hope that changes before they launch, but I'm not holding my breath. Poor form MS :(

I just tried it in Chrome, and it doesn't work there either.

Looks more like a content encoding error (or something to do with their server not sending the correct headers) than an attempt to block the images in non-IE browsers.

Try this link: http://www.magmagateau.com/this/xbla_avs.html

Looks good.

Probably because it's only in a testing phase... making it work on other browsers is probably secondary to getting everything up and running on their browser... you wouldn't expect google to make sure something worked on a competing browser before their own now that they have one would you?