Wii Trial Browser Review

Today I was thrilled to see the soft blue glow of my Wii through the morning mist. Wii Internet browser was here!

A quick download later and I was staring at an uncluttered interface.

The main toolbar has shockingly few buttons. In fact there is no location bar. And after browsing around I didn’t miss it. You can tell where you are easily because every website is distinctive and usually tells you somewhere. To change location you need to go Home first, then click the Go button. Not troublesome.

Going back is instant, and thus better than my Linux Firefox (which is sometimes instant, but usually not). And frankly it is instant more often than Opera is on my Windows PC. Apparently browsing on an Operating System that doesn’t have very much going on is far more stable and consistent in terms of interface responsiveness.

Text on webpages is barely legible at the default zoom level. This seems a bizarre choice. You can zoom in easily, but doing this for every site becomes tedious. Reading text at the default level is possible, but eye-straining. I imagine the idea is you zoom in when you have quickly located the area of the webpage you want to read. But nonetheless I am not convinced this is a sensible design decision. I imagine the developers wanted websites to look right, just like they do on your computer, but since Standard definition is half the resolution of your average PC, you get unreadable text. Amusingly the Wii homepage is one of the worst examples since you have a light grey font on a white background at a tiny pitch.

Zooming is easy and quick, so perhaps this is no hardship. Afterall you do get a good overview of the whole page width with the default zoom level, after that just point at the bit you like and zoom.

Scrolling works by holding down the ‘B’ button and moving the cursor towards where you want to go. Much like the middle mouse button scrolling in PC browsers. For me this sucks, and I feel it would be much nicer to push the button and drag the webpage like with the Weather Channel Globe, Google Maps and Adobe Reader.

Text entry is easy enough with the standard Wii Qwerty overlay, but obviously a keyboard is quicker. But it’s much faster with the Wiimote than with the Xbox 360 gamepad for instance. There are now suggestions for words as you type which is nice, and will probably help make usage a little quicker.

Pages loaded fast. Faster than I am used to on my connection. Faster than Opera on my Linux machine, which is a fairly fast machine. However, there is no feedback that loading is happening at first. You get a very cute click sound from the Wiimote, which I love. And after a few seconds you get a progress bar across the whole screen width (which is great, what is it with 20 pixel progress bars in most browsers?), but when a site is slow to respond you can quickly become uneasy — did I click it properly? Should I click it again? What’s happening!? etc. Wii shop has a spinning circle of dots which works well, Wii browser needs the same IMO.

Pages rendered fine. I saw no misrenderings or Javascript failures, and expected none. This is Opera after all and nowadays Opera on PC renders almost everything perfectly.

The trial browser also has some notable features left out that apparently will be filled in. Like you can edit Favorites but not add new ones.

Hopefully Opera will address some of my complaints when they release the full version in March.

But overall I am impressed. Enough to use it regularly? Not really, websites are designed for PCs and even though the Wiimote is almost as good as a mouse, without high-definition and without a keyboard, there isn’t quite enough magic going on in the Wii browser to make up for it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 10:39 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.