The trial version of the Opera Browser for the Nintendo Wii is now available. The browser is available from the Wii Shop Channel, and as promised, currently costs 0 points. The browser takes up around 280 blocks of memory for the Wii and downloads within a minutes. Overall, the browsing experience on the Wii is fairly good; most websites work correctly, including AJAX sites like GMail and others. Flash support seems hit or miss, some sites work correctly and others say that the user needs to upgrade their Flash version. Hopefully the Flash engine will be updated by the time the browser fully releases this spring.

The web browser has a default view that scales web page output to fit the 480i/p screen, but users can zoom in to get a cleaner view of the page, and there is an alternate rendering mode to allow slightly better text rendering at the cost of re-organizing the page. Users can scroll up and down using the “B” trigger on the Wiimote, and the “A” button selects links. The virtual keyboard works surprisingly well, and the Wiimote does an excellent job of acting as a mouse. Overall, the experience appears to be vastly better than the portable browser released for the DS; one could actually do some light Internet browsing and e-mail on the Wii, something that is pretty painful for the DS.