Download Opera Browser For Your Nintendo Wii
Posted by Dave on January 20th, 2007 in Industry Buzz, Nintendo GBA
Grab a free Opera browser for your Nintendo Wii today! A free trial version of the Opera browser is available for download on Nintendo’s hot new game console - Wii.
The release of the final version of the Opera browser for Wii is currently scheduled for late March 2007. Users who download Opera before June 30, 2007, can continue to use the browser at no cost for the lifetime of the Wii system! Wanna get one for your Wii? Just do as the comic above tells you 
The Opera browser for Wii is based on the same standards compliant core as Opera 9, and includes the Adobe Flash Plug-in. This means that Web sites can be tested using the latest version of the Opera desktop browser. I’ve been using Opera since its early days, and think that Opera is still the safest, fastest, smallest, and coolest browser on earth today. Obviously, ConsoleWatcher.com looks fine in Opera (desktop PCs) and Wii too!
Besides, Opera has built an optimized exclusive My Opera splash page for users accessing from Wii. Sorry, it’s currently only for Wii users, and if you are using Opera on a PCs, you will only see a page which tells you to get a Wii :). My Opera for Wii will feature gaming news, spotlighted bloggers and groups, as well as links to forums about gaming and Nintendo Products.
More Info
- Wii browser uses Flash version 7. While Nintendo and Opera would love to use Flash 9, Flash 7 is the latest version they make available for licensing for embedded devices. For Flash to work on Wii, it must be targeted towards version 7 or below.
- Compared to a modern PC or Mac, the Wii has limited memory resources. For this reason, if you make heavy use of Flash, with high bandwidth content (such as movie streaming) then you may have performance issues on the Wii. Things such as rewinding videos may not work, as the Wii can not hold all of the video in memory like a desktop can. It is important to try to optimise your flash code as much as possible if you’d like to give as good an experience as possible.
- Also of interest to developers is that the Wii Browser supports a variation of our Small Screen Rendering technology. This is the technology we use in our small screen devices, to reformat a page to fit in one column with no horizontal scrolling. In general people will use a big screen while surfing the Wii, but the resolution difference between some modern mobile phones and standard definition TV is not that great. If you define a handheld stylesheet, the automatic reformatting will be overridden with the styles you define in the stylesheet. This will allow you full control on how the page is rendered in this mode. Bare in mind however that this will also be used on mobiles, so this shouldn’t be designed with the Wii in mind. One useful trick you could do with a handheld stylesheet, as well as to eliminate the horizontal scrolling, is to bump up the text size. This will make the text more readable on both Wii and Mobile, without having to zoom.
- If your site works in Opera 9 then it is 95% towards being Wii compatible.
Opera is a great browser. I wouldn’t have wrote this page if it wasn’t for my n years of using Opera as a browser. Kudos for the partnership between Opera and Nintendo. You both made great choices, right decisions and just look perfect together!
Original Story
Notes for website developers
clearer text ?
download faster ?