I couldn't resist blogging from the Wii, I just received the Internet channel this morning, well actually I was woken up at 5AM by the Wii's pulsing blue light. I wish Nintendo would consider people in different timezones when making these announcement's I'm sure many people like me have the console in their bedroom and the "dim" setting for the pulsing light isn't dim enough.

Anyway the browser, how does it fair? Well the font size on summer-daze can be read but is far to small to be legible. On my computer I set the minimum font size to 15/16 to make sites easier on my eyes however this is not an option on the Wii, at least not in the current trial version who knows what extra features the final may have.

The browser appears to mimic 1024 pixel width judging by the fact that I can see large boarders around my site. I was hoping for a width of 800 as it would make things much more legible on an SDTV. Apart from that there isn't really a lot to report, it's just a browser after all and a very basic one at t

EDIT: No I haven't finished the above sentence early that's all the Wii would let me type!

As I was getting near to the end of my post the Wii started to become very sluggish, till eventually it would simply refuse to type any more letters. The Wii is unsuitable for blogging even with a keyboard addon in it's current state. Unless of course you only plan on making short blog posts.

Well I have had time to play with the browser more now. YouTube was working perfectly this morning but is now broken, I believe this is most likely some change YouTube has made to their Javascript or Flash version, it could be a "silent update" issued to Wii consoles however. Google video still works and a few other sites.

Regarding stability, I have managed to make it crash three or four times during one day. This means the entire console has to be hard reset with the power switch as it totally locks up. The crashes ocourred when watching flash videos or using Gmail.

I do have some opinions on improvements that should and in some cases need to be implemented, tabbed browsing should be implemented since you can't have a new window. A popup would no longer popup but replace the page you are looking at with the popup, tabs are the best way to handle this.

Something that really needs updating is a MAJOR security issue, you can't see the URL of the site you are browsing nor the URL of links you are clicking on. Imagine reading an email that's supposedly from paypal clicking on the link to a site that looks like paypal apart from the address that you can't see. Makes scams much easier. I really hope Nintendo address this issue soon, URL's may be unsightly on their "uber n00b" designed web browser but taking them away is not the answer.

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