Post a Comment
Screenshots here!
http://wiinintendo.net/?p=110
It looks fantastic, with excellent use of the two screens. Eg, One full page screen to control the other zoomed in screen. It also has handwriting recognition.
As someone said before, the ironic thing is that the Wii broswer will probably be more standard compliant than IE in Vista :-)
The article is about the Wii, not the DS! Either way this is good news.
And lets please not get into _ANY_ Opera vs Firefox wars please. I don't care which is your favourite browser or who invented what, as long as it's not IE and that you're happy with your choice.
Do note those are DS screenshots, while this article is talking about their upcoming Wii. (eek, beaten)
I'm quite happy for this outcome, as Opera is a great browser and this should be a great help for their market share.
(btw, trying to click the reply button just refreshes the page for me. Anyone know how to fix that?)
Edited 2006-05-10 18:01
The license has little to do with the skill of the programmer. The quality of the program is down to management. Opera is a tight-knit hard working, full time team. Firefox (and I'm a big fan myself), has a lot of part time staff who work for Google and other companies, and progress is very slow.
Well anyone who has told you that is an idiot, and you are an idiot as well for believing them. They say the method of open source development is better in the longrun, not that open source developers are automatically more skilled than closed source developers.
And really, if your whole purpose in life is to troll online message boards to get a little bit of glee and amusement by annoying people for a fraction of a second, then you are a very sad individual indeed. Reading through some of your comment history makes it very clear that you are very much against Linux and OSS, so quit pretending to be oh so outraged that they went with Opera instead of Firefox, and grow up.
"Why didn't they go with Open Source?"
Cause they didn't want to? Cause Opera is lighter and faster? There are tons of possible reasons. Firefox isn't the end all, be all of the browser industry, and if Nintendo thinks Opera will work out better for them, then I am all for it.
Maybe if they went with Firefox it would be a slap in the face of the proprietary but much more advanced browser Opera. Did you ever think of that? :-P
Oh, and by the way, those downloads you grab from Mozilla.com contain proprietary software, just to let you know.
(Using Camino right now myself)
>> This is a slap in the face of the open source browser firefox.
Frankly, it could use a few good slaps to keep them honest. Maybe (we can hope) it will be a wake-up call.
A large company like Nintendo EVER choosing a open source product like firefox for their hardware is REALLY unlikely - see, they are in the business of MAKING money... and frankly, trusting a bunch of 'volunteers' to spend time fixing (or not fixing) the product is not going to end up high on the list of options. It would cost them more money to bring on a staff to maintain the build for their hardware than it would to just pay a company like MS or Opera to do just make one for them - not to mention learning curve time needed for 'in house' porting.
Besides, Firefox has made how many inroads on embedded devices and thin clients so far? Opera on the other hand is THE weapon of choice on mobile and other thin clients not running Windows CE. (and it's even available on a couple of those)
Between Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, they are a full generation AHEAD of anything Gecko based in the non-desktop market.
It wasn't just the embedded deals, a lot of revenue comes from selling referrals to the likes of Google, Amazon and eBay:-
http://www.gigaom.com/2005/09/21/google-made-opera-browser-free/
Planetweb Browser for Dreamcast sucks until version 3 while Dream Passport is way better than the former on its time.
http://www.dricas.com/dp/
Anyone knows the user agents of the DS and Wii Opera browsers? To check the user agent you can visit this page with your nintendo browser: http://www.osnews.com/ua.php
Edited 2006-05-10 19:33
Nintendo is not a company notorious for doing things in-house. They generally hire external companies to do their dirty work, rather than staffing up. Japan has a tradition of hiring for life, means every time you bulk up you commit your company to the next 40 years.
They needed a browser for the DS. Opera is well known in the embedded realm as one of the smallest and least bad. Firefox would not have fit, and they had no obvious choices for people who would make it fit, so they went with Opera.
Now with the Wii they need a browser. They can either use established contacts at Opera, or they can try to find someone capable of adapting Firefox for it and worry about supporting two different browsers on two platforms. They chose to go with their DS browser provider. It seems like the right choice to me.






