This morning Nintendo made available through the Wii Shop Channel (under Wii Ware) a trial version of the Opera Browser for 0 Wii Points. This is the first program I've purchased through their Shop, so it was fun to see the little animated 8-bit Mario they've got running around while the software downloads.
This is a trial version, which implies that the full version has more features. The trial version is a very stripped down browser -- it has support for Flash, and appears to run at a resolution of approximately 800x 600. On our 20 inch non-HDTV, the letters are hard to make out when zoomed out all the way -- zooming in one level makes it much easier to read, and the browser has included a single column mode which zooms in and squeezes the content into one column to make it easier to read.
The web is eerily quiet when surfing on the Wii. This is likely caused by an expectation from the Wii and the TV to bombard us with both video and audio, and surfing the web in silence feels like an awkward pause in the dinner conversation. Surfing feels really passive on the Wii, and entering URLs are painful using the onscreen keyboard, and javascript seems to be partially enabled at best. I managed to crash the browser (and the console) a few times during my trial run. Some web forms (the ones that take an input without a "go" button) won't work on the Wii, and letters normally hidden into a password field on input on forms are not hidden.
I think the internet browser experience is better on the computer at the moment (though digital photos look pretty good on the Wii). Flash sites work great on the Wii, and while my own site doesn't quite render properly on the Wii (it's due for a redesign anyways), my random sampling found that many sites did display fine.
Flickr: Nintendo Wii: Opera Browser
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