Gaming Wii U Internet Browser Specs Revealed...you know for those who care

Hadrian · Nov 6, 2012

Via it's own website, Nintendo has put out the specs for the Wii U Internet Browser. Here are those specs for those who care about that sort of thing.

http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu/features/browser-specs/

Browser Engine

NetFront® Browser NX v2.1

User agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Nintendo WiiU) AppleWebKit/534.52 (KHTML, like Gecko) NX/{Version No} NintendoBrowser/{Version No}.US

Supported Protocols

HTTP1.0/HTTP1.1/SSL3.0/TLS1.0/TLS1.1/TLS1.2

Web Standard

HTML4.01/HTML5/XHTML1.1/CSS1/CSS2.1/CSS3. (partial functionality)

DOM1-3/ECMAScript

XMLHttpRequest/canvas/Video/Web Storage (partial functionality)

Web Messaging/Server-Sent Events/Device Orientation/WOFF/SVG

Plug-ins

Does not support plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash.

TouchEvent

The browser supports only one of these at a time: touchstart, touchend, touchmove, touchcancel

Screen resolution

If it isn't specified, width is 980px layout

It is possible to specify width/height of the viewport within the HTML’s <head>...</head>, and specify scaling permission via user-scalable meta tags.

(e.g) <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no"/>

Saving/upload of image/video

Not supported

Video Format

MP4, M3U8+TS(HTTPLiveStreaming)

(Some videos may not be playable.)

Video Codec

H.264 - MPEG-4 AVC Video

(Some videos may not be playable.)

Audio Codec

AAC - ISO/IEC 14496-3 MPEG-4 AAC

(Some audio may not be playable.)

So yeah no flash, which was to be expected and I think was already confirmed...

Fear Zoa · Nov 6, 2012

Its nice to finally see some specs, unfortunately i'm not really sure what to make of them, sucks it won't support flash but we already knew that .

chris888222 · Nov 6, 2012

At least the browser supports YouTube.

Issac · Nov 6, 2012

Yeah, such a shame it doesn't support flash... (even though people always scream it's broken blah blah... some small flash games could be fun to poke around with

)

Rydian · Nov 6, 2012

Kinda' glad to see there's no support for lower SSL versions, which are considered broken (and no, not in a way that would allow hacking the unit). This points to some care in selection.

I do wonder why HTTP 1.0 support is there, seeing as 1.1 was in RFC form in 1999... it can be assumed that any web server software still in use uses 1.1 now (as I doubt the browser is meant for other things), but whatever, it's not like having it opens holes.

Partial CSS3? That's encouraging, though probably just coming along like that because of Webkit (CSS3 on the whole is more than just "static" skinning like CSS2 and below focused on).

ECMAScript is a "proper" name for javascript, for those that are curious.

Canvas/Video/WebStorage are some of the major things people talk about when referring to "HTML5", so it can be assumed that some "HTML5" functionality will work, even if the browser's not implementing everything according to standards (or everything at all).

SVG support is nice, lots of diagrams on Wikipedia are in that format already... though I'd like to know how it handles scaling (early implementations tended to screw it up).

Only supporting H.264 with AAC? That's pretty standard (almost the standard combination for videos in the MP4 container nowadays), but I'd have liked to see support for other formats for non-flash streaming.

Gahars · Nov 6, 2012

Flash, ahhhhh... you'll have to get it elsewhere!

the_randomizer · Nov 6, 2012

chris888222 said:
At least the browser supports YouTube.

I thought that used Flash and not HTML5.

jalaneme · Nov 6, 2012

the browser specs are not anything exciting, i don't think i would use the wii u browser anyways.

Traversal · Nov 6, 2012

the_randomizer said:
I thought that used Flash and not HTML5.

There's a version of the player for both Flash and HTML5.

PizzaPino · Nov 6, 2012

the_randomizer said:
I thought that used Flash and not HTML5.

both. you can set youtube to only use html5 if you like http://www.youtube.com/html5

edit:

'd

The Milkman · Nov 6, 2012

Cool, Mozilla, so I suppose its going to similar to FireFox in a sense or am I completely off?

emigre · Nov 6, 2012

So I can't stream pr0n?

Deleted-185407 · Nov 6, 2012

It's using a slightly newer version of WebKit than Android 4.0 uses. So you can probably use Android 4.0 as a basis of what to expect from the browser, which is actually pretty decent. Not great, but still pretty good. It means website developers won't have to worry too much about getting their site to work on the Wii U.

Taleweaver · Nov 6, 2012

My main question is: how well will I be able to zoom in on naughty pictures?

Oh, and how easy it is to use the gamepad as a virtual keyboard while the main screen serves as the "monitor".

Rydian · Nov 6, 2012

Zantigo said:
Cool, Mozilla, so I suppose its going to similar to FireFox in a sense or am I completely off?

Webkit, so the rendering engine will be the same thing Chrome uses.

The UI, however, isn't directly related to the rendering engine.

Coto · Nov 6, 2012

Uhm when I saw "netfront I was like, noooooooooooooooooo.". Well at least we still got some good compatibility with older webpages, and css2.0+.

Flash is buggy as hell, also it can run custom code(ie:user code) in a very specific way so it's a no no for gaming consoles. (kinda aww, yes i know) but i've seen some stuff done on html5 and it's still something*

XMLhttprequest seems to be part of ASP,PHP connection standards(like, a socket required to get working those)

And, is still good to see they have insecure / secure web protocols because of compatibility with most webpages.

It'd be a shame to run X webpage and it can't run because the web browser expects an updated webpage

Wizerzak · Nov 6, 2012

This might make you guys more optimistic about it

The browser is wicked powerful when you compare it to modern video game consoles and even stands up or out-performs browsers on popular devices such as iPad.
For starters, it’s running a version of NetFront browser — NX v2.1 — which apparentlyoutperform even Internet Explorer 10 on PC. It also seems to support HTML 5 for modern websites, but will not support plugins such as Adobe Flash (though to be honest, that’s fast becoming a non-issue).

So, a great speed AND html5 support. Sounds great to me! Sure flash is a bit of a downside but that doesn't matter as much as it used to (especially as Apple survived long enough without it).

Cyan · Nov 6, 2012

It's nice to see it's supporting javascript/ajax (XMLhttprequest) and has touchscreen events (the functions to detect if the screen is touched/moved etc. directly from the webpage script, which can interact with the user's action. I'm sure some website will be using it especially for WiiU/gaming related on WiiU gamepad).

CSS3 support is good too (even if partially, no browser have it fully supported anyway, right?)

Rydian · Nov 6, 2012

Last I checked CSS3 wasn't even finalized (like think other standards are). So it's kind of like like "draft-n"...

Treeko · Nov 7, 2012

of course it won't support Flash,they already dropped support so long ago,happy though it'll support HTML5.

Gaming Wii U Internet Browser Specs Revealed...you know for those who care

Literally as TIGHT as a gnats chuff.

Still Alive

GBAtemp's Flygon Fan

Iᔕᔕᗩᑕ

Resident Furvert™

Bakayaro Banzai

The Temp's official fox whisperer

Female Gamer

Soooo cool!

Well-Known Member

GBATemp's Official Asshat Milkman

Deck head

Deleted-185407

Guest

Storywriter

Resident Furvert™

-

Because I'm a potato!

GBATemp's lurking knight

Resident Furvert™

Well-Known Member

Popular threads in this forum