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Wii The Internet

Wii's Opera Browser Now Downloadable 92

Posted by Zonk from the they-see-us dept.
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.
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Wii's Opera Browser Now Downloadable More

Wii's Opera Browser Now Downloadable

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  • And this story is the first thing Isee. (typing is a bitch)

    • Re:just got it working (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fozzyuw ( 950608 ) on Friday December 22, 2006 @11:48AM (#17338354)

      Yes, my experience is...

      • Checked my Gmail account
      • Difficult to see the screen, as it was really small. You can 'zoom' in with the +/- buttons
      • Gmail rendered nicely, and fairly fast.
      • After being zoomed in, I hit the 'back' button to go back, and my Wii hard locked. I had to press (and hold) the power button on the console to turn it on/off. It rebooted and there where no 'side effects'. However, I couldn't turn the Wii off with the Wii Remote.

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fozzyuw ( 950608 )

        After being zoomed in, I hit the 'back' button to go back, and my Wii hard locked. I had to press (and hold) the power button on the console to turn it on/off. It rebooted and there where no 'side effects'. However, I couldn't turn the Wii off with the Wii Remote.

        Sorry, this isn't written well. I hit submit before preview. I couldn't turn the Wii off with the remote after it hard locked, making me have to push the power button on the console. Which makes sense since the Remote was basically dead. The r

      • I tried to hit the shop channel last night and my Wii sat at the connecting screen for about 35 minutes before I pulled the power cord.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Bibz ( 849958 )
        Also tried it, it's relatively fast, faster than dial up at least

        Things i noticed :
        - When you type in a password field, you see every characters, not stars or dots...
        It's kind of annoying when you want to check your e-mail with other people around.

        - When i tried slashdot.org it brought me to a search page (a bad one, it didn't have slashdot), i had to type WWW.slashdot.org do get to it.

        - You can't set your own start page

        - It's very small on a 27" TV, i always have to zoom in to read.

        Appart from those points

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LKM ( 227954 )

          When you type in a password field, you see every characters, not stars or dots

          That's not good, but in reality, you wouldn't want to enter your password with people around even if it was displayed as dots, since if they can see the password field, they can see you using your keyboard on screen, too :-)

          You can't set your own start page

          There is no actual "start page." For those who haven't used it, the "start page" isn't some web site, but a starting point which offers access to some of WiiOpera's fea

      • 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.

        Related to this, how's regular navigation? One thing I've noticed whenever I put a DVD in my computer is that it's easier to navigate the menus with a mouse than with the arrows on my remote. And those are usually designed with arrow-navigation in mind.

        The web is mostly designed by peopl

        • You use the Wiimote as a pointer, just like in the menus!
        • While I haven't had the chance to test the browser out (it errored out this morning before I had to leave for work), I'd imagine that the browser treats the Wiimote as a pointer. This is because the Wii shop channel is a webpage (people have been able to access other sites from the Wii by using spoofed DNS servers and such and there are ways to access the Shop channel contents from within Firefox) that treats the Wiimote as a pointer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gmezero ( 4448 )
        Check out the GameCube keyboards, Ascii and several others made keyboards for use with games like Phantasy Star Online. Since the Wii has GameCube controller ports, they might just work. I know I'm going to start looking for one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BillX ( 307153 )
        There will need to be a 'wii keyboard' or remote attachment.

        A Wiiboard?

        *ducks*

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 7Prime ( 871679 )
          Look out, Google's planning on releasing one, it's called the "WiiGii Board", and supposedly, with it, you can email the dead.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bicho ( 144895 )
        I think the keyboard would be plugged into the wiimote instead of the console.
        At least I would like it better that way
    • I just started using the browser and I like it. It isn't as useful as a browser on a pc, but I like that I'm now capable of browsing from my bed (of course you control everthing with one hand ;) I'm typing with the wiimote and it's reasonably fast with the word suggestion.
    • Why can't they use something akin to T9 on mobile phones or an interface similar to Dasher [cam.ac.uk]?
      A virtual keyboard is easy to adapt to, but it's not the optimal input method considering the hardware.
  • I saw the notice this morning (the blue light flashing) but I won't get a chance to try it until after work. Has anyone here tried it? How does the text look on an HDTV (I know it's only 480p)? How easy/hard is it to navigate with the Wiimote? Does it feel fast or slow?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Troed ( 102527 )
      The lack of 720p (at least) really hurts what would otherwise be a nice feature. I have my Wii connected (480p of course) to a projector with a 110" canvas, and yet I need to zoom a lot of the time to be able to read text.

      Pity.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvan256 ( 722131 )
        I wish people would stop complaining about the lack of 1080p, 720p, etc. At least the Wii has 480p (had to since the Gamecube also had it, at least with selected games).

        Also, what's so hard about browsing in 480? Last time I checked, computers were also using 640x480 years ago. Heck, there was still some 640x480 users at the beginning of 2004 [w3schools.com]. Stop acting like 480 pixels of vertical resolution is the end of the world.
        • Not to try to be an ass, but most sites are designed nowadays for 1024x768 or more. When was the last time you LIKED browsing at 640x480? I would've liked to have seen an HD option (even if not in game) but at least for this reason.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Yvan256 ( 722131 )
            The best output option for the Wii seems to be the components cable, so that means 480p at best (AFAIK).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Maul ( 83993 )
      It works fine, supports Flash. The only real problem is the horizontal scrolling, as most web pages are designed for higher resolution PCs. That's fine, I don't expect browsing the web from a console to be as robust as on a computer.

      It is sufficient to check GameFAQs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Maul ( 83993 )
        I guess one more thing against it is that it really isn't appropriate for online chatting/forums the with the current input scheme. Again, not a big deal since I plan on using it primarily to BROWSE for information, not post on /.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TechnoLust ( 528463 ) *
        Now if you could switch between the browser and game without closing them out and going back to the Wii menu, that would make looking up a hint when you get stuck at Zelda a snap! I guess I'll continue to keep my wireless laptop on the couch beside me until then.
    • Even on a crappy non-HD tv, the text looks great once you zoom in. I assume that on a bigger tv the zoom would be less necessary.

      The browser is definitely fast, though there's some latency before the page is shown where there's no obvious "loading" throbber.

      Having used the web browser on the PSP, I have to say that the wii's browser is far more pleasant to use. The onscreen keyboard, while hunt-and-pecky, is far better than a cellphone-style text input; the zoom is easy, and the trigger-scrolling is good
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I'm surprised that Opera didn't implement their Fit To Width feature. Maybe it'll be put in the final version.
  • A friend has it and says he really likes it, but noticed one thing. Fark apparently requires the user to scroll horizontally to see all of the content. A feature I'd like to see in modern browsers is an option to override absolute size specifications on websites to keep things scrolling in one dimension. On an embedded devices like a cell phone or game console (and maybe even a desktop browser, why not) I'd be willing to trade a slight departure from the 'artistic vision' of a web designer for enhanced u

    • Re:Neat! (Score:4, Informative)

      by MagicM ( 85041 ) on Friday December 22, 2006 @11:47AM (#17338342)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Enoxice ( 993945 )
        The Game|Life article led me to believe there was a Column View mode (like Opera does on PDAs/Phones). Could be wrong...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hords ( 619030 )
        I haven't tried it, but someone said to hit the "2" button and it will use the "Fit to width" feature

    • Re:Neat! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mirkon ( 618432 ) <mirkon AT gmail DOT com> on Friday December 22, 2006 @11:49AM (#17338374) Homepage
      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MagicM ( 85041 )
      They may not have included "Fit to width" mode in the Wii version of Opera, but they included "Small screen" mode (renamed to "Single column" mode), which should be exactly what you're describing:

      Single column mode: To view the Web page in new way, select single column mode to get your content stacked. This mode is similar to Opera's Small Screen Rendering technology for mobile phones and other small screen devices, and is useful when viewing content from a distance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fozzyuw ( 950608 )

      This browser is a new thing, and it will likely make websites more accessed via a TV. Web designers to this point rarely if ever design with TV's in mind. However, there's a nice article [alistapart.com] on how to start designing sites to fit many different size screens from cell phones, to PDA's, to 24" widescreen LCD monitors.

      Though, this is not entirely possible due to browser compatibility, time to develop, unobtrusive JavaScript, etc., etc. But, it might be worth to start designing a site to work well on the Wii as

    • The Wii browser contains the feature exactly as you describe it.

      Press the '2' button and the site is automatically reformatted sol that you need only scroll down to see the entire site. It's really helpful for reading long articles. The text is large and with the wii-mote you can make text scroll at a nice slow steady pace much like a tele-prompter.

  • "Comic" Link from Game|Life (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enoxice ( 993945 ) on Friday December 22, 2006 @11:47AM (#17338336) Journal
    Along with a video and screenshots, Game|Life links to a comic by Opera explaining how to get it working:
    http://www.opera.com/products/devices/nintendo/wii /comic/ [opera.com]

    ...yeah

    Video: http://www.opera.com/nintendo/wii/video [opera.com]
    Pictures: http://www.opera.com/nintendo/wii/screenshots [opera.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SuperRob ( 31516 )
      By the way, in case anyone thought that Game|Life really did redesign their page for the Wii ... if you read the article you'd know that they didn't. They just used the Zoom function. They're pretty clear about that, but most people don't get past the initial joke about having redesigned the page just for the Wii.

      Whatever happened to reading comprehension?

  • Everyone's favorite surfing habits (Score:3, Funny)

    by dave-tx ( 684169 ) * <df19808+slashdot.gmail@com> on Friday December 22, 2006 @11:55AM (#17338484)

    Let me guess...there are "particular" Wiimote gestures that will bring up porn, right?

  • Typing is kinda tough but it suggests words, like a cell phone.
  • Pointing the wiimote at the tv to click on something feels right. Overall I'm pretty happy with it except for one thing.

    The zoom feature is not quite right yet. You don't have finegrained enough control. Your either all the way in or all the way out.

    I was really looking forward to some homestarrunner.com full tv screen action.

    • The zoom feature is not quite right yet. You don't have finegrained enough control. Your either all the way in or all the way out.

      I was really looking forward to some homestarrunner.com full tv screen action.

      The zoom is actually a smart zoom. It will scale to fit whatever element you're hovering over. On youtube, if I hover over the video and hit + it will scale the video to be nearly full screen. If I hover over something else and hit + the video won't be the same size.

      So for homestar, just hover over f

    • Youtube full screen works perfect though. I scanned through some of my favorite vids last night.
  • I'm impressed at the level of things that work in the "trial" browser, e.g. I just logged in to my Slashdot account, watched a Google video, and almost everything I have implemented on my own websites - which use some admittedly sketchy scripting - doesn't just work, but works awesomely. (an image with an onClick attribute and an abbr tag around it not only does the proper clicking reaction, but will make the wiimote rumble on mouseover!)

    At the same time, I'm frustrated with the unnavigability of the thin
    • I think the obvious fix or workaround for this would be an "import bookmarks" feature. Then you can just e-mail yourself the bookmarks you use on your computer and install them into the Wii browser. I hope they implement this or a similar feature. You'd still have to type out URLs occasionally during normal use, but all your favourites won't have to be inputted manually. Don't know about you, but I have a lot of bookmarks. I ain't typin' them all in.
      • My fix for this was to favorite my del.icio.us page, and that has all my bookmarks already imported.

        Of course, my computer is literally 10' or less from my Wii, so I will never, ever actually use this feature for more than screwing around.
    • its kinda hit and miss, most normal sites work right, but it doesn't play youtube out-of-box (errr download). you'd think with it being a later build of Opera and supposedly including javascript and flash support it would work with almost any site but there are a few bugs. there were several sites that had login boxes that would pull up the keyboard then "crash" and reload the "home" site or reload the page after entering the username but not the password resulting in a error. however, we should expect s
  • Despite the common meme around here that these devices should stick to playing games, a browser is just too handy to have inside your console. And Opera just kicks ass. Their DS version is very clever.

    It makes me wonder if we're going to start to see pages formatted just for television readability, specifically for console browsers. If anything it enforces standards a little more - you NEED to be able to adjust the text size, some sites won't allow for that. And widescreen displays are a bit different of

  • It's great! Now I can watch google video on my tv. Youtube doesn't seem to work though, something about the version of flashplayer or javascript.
    • I take it back, my Wii just crashed while watching a video from video.google.com. It did not respond to anything, I had to pull out the power cord. It's a good thing it's still a trial version.
  • This is awesome! Takes forever to type but still cool. Biggest problem I see is that when I logged in to /. it showed the password in plain text. This is the first site I went to :)
  • The Opera browser for Wii is based on the same standards compliant core as Opera 9, and includes the Adobe Flash Plug-in.
    "Adobe Flash"? What?
  • Normal view - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=330182196& size=o [flickr.com]

    Zoomed in - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=330182199& size=o [flickr.com]

    I did quite like using it but after an hour I had a headache.

    Jonathan
    • Slashdot ... I did quite like using it but after an hour I had a headache.

      Don't worry, that's perfectly normal.
  • With the exception of keyboard support (if there is any, let me know :-) ), the Wii's Opera browser is perfect for "web 2.0" sites like Meebo.

    Go check it out. http://meebo.com [meebo.com]. You can sign in immediately from the page to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, ICQ, and Jabber, or you can sign up, create a profile, and all of your IM identities will get stored in the site for single sign-on.

    The only bad part is trying to type using an on-screen keyboard.

    What other nifty sites lend themselves to the Wii?
    • Well crud. Meebo's basically broken on the Wii. So much for that...

      On my system at least, the page is corrupted, with all sorts of layout issues.
  • When the browser went live I was able to use YouTube without a problem. This morning they put up some bullshit about not having the newest flash and Java plugins.

    However, the shitty Rocky Balboa trailer embedded on their homepage works just fine.

    They are fucking with us.
  • I didn't already have a top of the line desktop sitting right next to my TV. If I didn't have a computer it would be friggin' amazing but having to zoom in and out constantly to navigate a page is annoying. I do have to give some props to nintendo's download server. I have the whole thing downloaded in about 2 minutes time. I was expecting it to be flooded and take forever. When the final version is released it will definitely be something to grab, if only to avoid paying $5 for it once June hits. But
  • This is very impressive for a beta. Props to Opera and Nintendo for this. Just need a better way to type.

  • Wiicade! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Darkforge ( 28199 ) on Friday December 22, 2006 @12:51PM (#17339446) Homepage
    Wiicade [wiicade.com] 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
      Wii-oriented? you mean "works with a mouse"? Like 99% of all flash games on any flash arcade website anywhere?
      • Well, more than "works with a mouse", they require only a mouse, and are formatted specifically to fit the Wii's screen dimensions.
    • It's obvious that 90% of the games on wiicade weren't actually tested on a wii browser. Most of them have the following problems:

      1. They didn't embed fonts, so there isn't any text.
      2. They targetted flash 8 or 9.. the Wii uses flash 7.

  • Necessary Improvements (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Despero ( 918907 )
    So far, Opera on Wii is truly excellent for just being a preview release. Things that need to be implemented in the future version:
    • Wand
    • Cookies
    • Preferences
    • some type of keyboard accessory for the Wii (I know this was mentioned already

    With these four things, I truly believe the Opera browser on Wii will be a near-desktop quality Internet experience. While triyng to post comments on Slashdot using Wii, I noticed that every time a new page loaded I would have to log back in. This told me that either ther

  • So this would be rad, perhaps it already exists. The browser is known to play flash videos (ie youtube)...what would be hot is if you could install a application that would index and share videos out of a (or a bunch of) directories on a local machine in which you could browse to via the Wii webbrowser and playback xvid/divx files full screen in a flash player. Something like gnump3d for video playback in a flash player. Get on it, smart people.

  • Disappointing (Score:3, Informative)

    by ballwall ( 629887 ) on Friday December 22, 2006 @03:43PM (#17342190)
    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.
    • I was under the impression that they eventually want the same functionality in the Wii browser as with any browser. We can just hope that they throw in this functionality as well before they release the final version of it. If not, we can wait till someone installs linux on it.
  • I don't know if maybe things are slow due to traffic, but I can't seem to get on the shop channel, at all. Then again, I've been leaching wireless off my neighbors ever since my router broke last week, so things have been a bit in & out.
  • I just want everybody to know when you download the browser it states this is a trial and features were removed and they will be in the final version.

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