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

[Guild McCommunist]

If you wanted my pun "My hopes were gone in a Flash."

Although really I find web browsing to be really unneeded on all consoles, if I wanted to browse at home I'd just use a computer honestly. It feels much more relevant on mobile devices.

Plus most of the things you do online (porn excluded) can be done on your basic web browser and apps. Youtube app for Youtube, Facebook app for Facebook, etc etc.

I'm assuming you can use the Wii U pad as a keyboard too? In which case it won't be such utter shit to browse like other consoles (especially the horrendous "keyboard" on the Xbox 360 which was obviously designed by braindead retards).

 

[PolloDiablo]

I just want the possibility of reading gamefaqs during gameplay

 

[jalaneme]

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

great, so it's going to lag like hell then

 

[Eerpow]

Here's some footage of the browser in action. (we get a glimpse of gamepads youtube and keyboard usage too)

1:00
!

 

[Rydian]

That browser interface looks crappy. Though I guess if people got used to the Wii's after a time...

And wow, it's amazing how many technical English loanwords the Japanese use.

 

[the_randomizer]

Doesn't Netflix use HTML5?

 

[Foxi4]

As long as it will support HTML5 in an acceptable fashion, I have no gripes with this setup. Not having Flash may be a bummer as far as older sites or players are concerned, but truth to be told, companies involved in web browser creation should start removing this technology in favour of better HTML5 support until it's completely wiped off the face of the Earth - newer and better solutions have to replace older, obsolete ones, and what better way to entice website designers to embrace HTML5 than to make is obligatory?

 

[Maxternal]

I know it's a stupid thing to ask at this point but anyone know how likely it will be that there will be any exploits in those particular browsers it's based off of?

It would be cool if the Homebrew Channel just became the Homebrew Site that you navigated to and it just popped up through an exploit but I'm sure I'm being too optimistic.

 

[loco365]

Saving/upload of image/video
Not supported

Well fuck. That would have actually been a nice addition tbh.

Audio Codec
AAC - ISO/IEC 14496-3 MPEG-4 AAC
(Some audio may not be playable.)

Although, this is nice to see.

 

[Rydian]

I know it's a stupid thing to ask at this point but anyone know how likely it will be that there will be any exploits in those particular browsers it's based off of?

It would be cool if the Homebrew Channel just became the Homebrew Site that you navigated to and it just popped up through an exploit but I'm sure I'm being too optimistic.

The only reason that website exploit worked in iOS (if that's what you're thinking of) wasn't due to the browser itself, it was due to the PDF reader plugin/functionality. Older multimedia plugins have historically been insecure (a glance a flash's five mile long in-the-wild exploit list would give any security professional nightmares, and the word "activex" still evokes rage), which is part of the reason there's been such a big movement for phasing them out. Hell, Chrome includes it's own modded version of flash simply because the standard version can't be sandboxed properly (and the sandboxed version in Chrome only works because it has core features forcibly stripped, the process it runs under doesn't even have disk access!) and browser plugin exploits are a huge deal nowadays since so much info is online, and as systems diverge browser plugins become one of the few vectors for attack where a ton of people are still using the same version range of the same software.

The fact that there's no plugin support could be a step for security.

Or... it could just be that they didn't want to include only flash 7 (which became "stable" ages ago) and thus confuse customers when some old flash games work but modern streaming sites don't, or crap like that.

Or maybe they just don't want to do all the extra work and pay even more licensing fees and junk.

So I suppose there's a multitude of reasons to not include plugin support.

 

[fossda]

Saving/upload of image/video
Not supported Come on Nintendo, even the 3DS can download save images...