I just got a Nintendo Wii and I have been playing with the internet features of it and I must say I am very impressed with the version of the Opera web browser on it. It seems to render pages very well, including some very advanced Javascript. The zooming works really well with the wiimote and makes any page readable; even on the old television that I have.

There only a few drawbacks I have found with the browser. The first one is that when you are trying to watch video on the Wii from a website it is only able to download as much as it has space on its internal memory; which by default is 256MB. So if you are trying to watch a particularly long video it may freeze halfway through. You can expand this memory by purchasing an SD card for it, but I just got this thing on Monday so I haven’t got a lot of accessories yet. The other drawback is that the Flash player for the Wii isn’t completely functional. So some of the more advanced Flash elements do not work properly. You really can’t blame Opera for that; Macromedia (and now subsequently Adobe) has always been very lax about releasing solid Flash plugins for non mainstream systems (i.e. Linux).

The reason the browser is a workout is that you will really wear your arm out trying to write an article like this using the wiimote, pointing at each character on the keyboard screen. I tried to write this whole article on the Wii, but I gave up after so long and just got out my laptop to finish it off. I guess one other drawback of the Opera browser on the Wii is that it doesn’t have an enter button. Which in most cases wouldn’t be a problem but some lazy (or unthoughtful) web designers don’t put submit buttons with their forms, expecting that you should just be able to hit the enter key instead.

Overall the browser is awesome and I really like playing around on the internet while sitting on my couch with a remote control in my hand.

On a side note about Opera in general; I really think Opera is very well poised to take control of a decent market share of browser usage. Opera realizes that the future of web browsing is going to be very much filled with specialized devices and less with full size computers. And they already have browsers for many mobile and specialized devices. I mean if I could do all that I can with my laptop on something that fits in my pocket, I wouldn’t own a laptop.

Microsoft is there only real competition in this market so far with the version of Internet Explorer that runs on Windows Mobile, but Opera already has a browser for Windows Mobile too, and I can bet that the Opera browser is nicer (if IE for the desktop is any indication of the mobile version).