Slightly ajar

Search Google on your Wii

Do you own or are responsible for developing a web site? Is it ready for the arrival of Nintendo's Wii browser? While the browser isn't available to test, bar a few hacked versions of the shopping channel, it is relatively straight forward to find out how your site will work on the Wii browser. As Opera uses the same browser engine on the desktop as it does on it's embedded and mobile browsers, you don't need much more than a copy of the latest version of the desktop browser (download it here ) and a spare few minutes.

If your site works in Opera 9 then it is 95% towards being Wii compatible. Be sure to check out the beta release of our developer tools on Dev.Opera to make your life easier. Make sure that you rip out any browser sniffing that may be blocking Opera from accessing the site. The Wii browser shares a very similar User Agent string to Opera 9, so allowing Opera entry will also allow the Wii entry, as long as you don't match the exact UA string. If you are using a third-party menu that isn't working correctly, then it is likely an old version that sends Opera broken content. Upgrading to the newest version should fix the issues in most cases. The same goes for other JavaScript libraries, such as Rich Text editors.

Once it is working on the desktop, there are a couple of issues you may have to consider. 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. It will also be worth checking out Tarquin's article on efficient JavaScript to see how to wring out as much performance as possible. While Flash mostly works as expected, you'll not be so lucky if you make use of other plug-ins such as Quicktime and Windows Media. These will most likely not be included. Lastly, a TV's resolution is much lower than today's monitors. It will be worth resizing Opera's window to the size of a TV's resolution, and try switching on Fit-to-width. This can be activated by going to the View menu and then to Fit to Width. This resizes the page to eliminate horizontal scrolling. Try standing back from your monitor, as TV's are often used from the couch, and not as close as you would sit at your monitor. While your text may get too small to comfortably read at long distances on a TV, The Wii browser supports Adaptive Zoom, as can be seen in the video on the Wii homepage.

While I've been working with selective major sites to help them get ready for Wii, I can't contact every site. If you have been trying to get your site to work and have run into problems, or have any questions, then feel free to get in touch with me, and I'll look into how we can help you. Good luck bug hunting!

[UPDATE] There are a couple of other points that I'd like to raise now that the browser is out in Beta. First of all, the 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.

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. We have articles on designing for handhelds on Dev.Opera and I can help you with any queries. Cameron Moll has a book in the pipeline on mobile web design, and I'd highly recommend anyone to pick it up that is interested in designing sites to work beyond the desktop.