The slow trickle of news about the software on the Wii U continues to dribble, but now we can cross “So what’s the technical specifications for the browser?” off the list. Here comes a list of Wii U browser things that really won’t matter until a video you are trying to play won’t start.

From the features page of the Wii U site:

  • 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 …, and specify scaling permission via user-scalable meta tags.
    • (e.g)
  • 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.)

Probably the most notable thing here is that this browser does not support Flash, which is either a good or bad thing depending on where you stand. Fortunately, it does support HTML5 and H.264, which means pretty much every Youtube video will still play on the device. And let’s be honest, cat videos are pretty much the only thing that will be played through Wii U browser anyway, so this is not a huge deal.

The browser can be used during gameplay (sort of) that will certainly be nice. You can pause your game and open up the browser to check whatever you need or look up help for your game if you are a dirty cheater. Let’s hope that there is a pretty good in-page search feature so that we can utilize Gamefaqs to its fullest.