My homeboys over at Nintendo Life (where I have been known to edit the odd review) have scored a sweet exclusive with Berit Hanson, Public Relations Specialist at Opera. They’ve just put out the DS Browser in Japan, and it’s winging its way over to Europe and Australia sometime soon. But the subject of this little chat is the upcoming Opera browser for the Wii. There’s some interesting talk of the rendering abilities of the browser, which will not only refit, but adapt the content of a site to the TV screen, and the - admittedly expected - revelation that the Wii will be running version 9.0. A lot of it’s “we can’t say yet wait for Nintendo to let us tell you” talk, but there is this snippit:
The biggest challenge has been to create the best “living room” Web experience, leveraging the unique capabilities of Wii. Opera has worked closely with Nintendo to achieve a breakthrough experience, especially in terms of incorporating the revolutionary Wii remote into the browsing experience.
As someone who grew up in the glory days of Teletext, I’m still a bit dubious about the whole “browser on a console” deal. But those comments suggest that Opera and Nintendo are pretty serious about getting this right. The use of the word “breakthrough” is helping me work through this - every other TV based browser has been absolute junk, so it’d better be a Goddamn breakthrough.