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Wii's Opera Browser Now Downloadable
As we discussed earlier this week, the Opera browser for the Wii is available in a sort of trial form today. Game|Life has apparently been so taken with this offering, that they've redesigned their site so that it can be easily viewable via the Wii browser. They also have the official details on the download. From that article: "Nintendo is currently offering a free trial of Opera for Wii which is now available for download. The release of the final version of the Opera browser for Wii is currently scheduled for late March 2007. Opera for Wii will remain a free download until June 30, 2007. After June 30, Opera will be available for download from the Wii Shop Channel for 500 Wii points. Users who download Opera before June 30, 2007, can continue to use the browser at no cost for the lifetime of the Wii system." The release goes on to mention how you can develop for the browser, with helpful website links and references.
Opera (at least on the desktop) has an option View->"Fit to width" that does just that. I'm surprised they haven't included it in the Wii version.
Yes, my experience is...
So, at that point, I was out the door to work. It's what I expect. This is more or less a open 'beta' test for the opera browser (without specifically saying it's an open beta test by Opera or Nintendo).
There will need to be a 'wii keyboard' or remote attachment. One that can fold up, like I've seen on some PDA's would be cool. But also allowing any USB keyboard to plug and play from the console would be nice as well.
The Gmail site rendered well and apparently JavaScript works well. I haven't tried any flash heavy sites, and I'm not sure how some sites will render, but I think it will be fairly good or as expected for a normal Opera browser. Though, I might just toss up some CSS pages to see how well this Opera browser supports CSS.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
In fact, the Wii Opera browser does have such a thing, when you press the '2' button it will compress an entire page into a single vertical column with larger text. But, any site that has a navigation bar makes this difficult to scroll through, since the nav bar will take up the top of the page and then some.
Glog!
Wiicade is well worth the price of admission. They have a collection of Wii-oriented Flash games you can play using the Wiimote. Tactical Assassin is the best.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
I haven't seen a negative point of view yet, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents.
I was midly disappointed with the browser.
It feels natural to use the d-pad for scrolling, but that doesn't work. Instead it's a combination of using the pointer and holding B. This means that to read a web page you have to keep your wiimote pointed at the screen the whole time. (vs just holding it in your lap and scrolling with the d-pad).
There are no options. At all (unless I'm missing something). The first thing I wanted to do was increase the minimum font size but there's no way to do it. On my screen you can't read anything but headings without zooming in (which brings up the scroll issue above). The columnar view is nice, but it's so close to readable without it that a small bump in minimum font size would mean I could probably see a whole page and read it in the normal layout.
On my screen (16:9) it doesn't fill the whole screen. There's a black bar on the top and right of the browser window that the cursor can go into, but pages aren't rendered there. No clue why that is.
The huge navigation bar at the bottom of the screen needs to auto hide or at least not take up 1/4 of the screen. There's precious little real estate as it is.
The favorites screen has a lot of lag. It seems that it's trying to download every favorite so it can render thems as icons every time you view your favorites.
It does handle flash video, though people have reported problems after some use (with it not rendering further videos). I haven't experienced this, you tube worked great for me.
As a renderer it's fine, as one would expect being based on Opera. This is about all that I like about it. I'd like the ease of selecting a favorite if they were snappier. I think on the whole it's got a lot of promise, but each piece needs work to get it where it needs to be. It's definitely simple, but simple to the point that it's almost not usable.
Also, it would be great to get quicktime support (trailers), but I imagine that's probably not on the todo list.