I remember poking around at the Wii U browser. Nintendo had examples of fetching the current state of buttons, analog sticks, and the touch screen to monitor for input.

While cool on paper, there wasn't a preventDefault() solution. So you could make a simple game where a sprite could move around and respond to "A," but if you press B, the browser would try to go Back a page. As the article mentions, the shoulder buttons activated a Gyro-based scroll mode (which wasn't great). "B" would go Back a page, Y would close/open the "curtain" on the TV, X would open the URL bar (thus showing the software keyboard and taking over all inputs), and Start/Select also did something, although I've since forgotten what.

So, although all button inputs were present, almost all of them also did something on the browser level, so nothing exciting ever came of it.

The browser on the Wii was amazing. I didn't use it all that often, but I was a big Opera fan back in the day, and it was amazing to see how well their engine scaled to all kinds of systems.

As far as I remember, there were even some games that supported the Wiimote natively? I don't remember if this was via Flash or Javascript, but there seems to be a library for the latter: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/wii-js

I unfortunately never got to use the Nintendo DS version (the DS being WEP-only was a dealbreaker for me).

If they brought up CDI and Pippin, then why leave out Commodore CDTV and CD32?

I thought the switch had a browser for a little bit. Am I mistaken?

I skimmed but did not see any references to browser-based jailbreaks simplifying pwning several consoles.

The Game Boy Color/GBA also had a web browser in the form of the Mobile Trainer GB, although it didn't allow inputting arbitrary URLs (although one can modify the DNS, it wasn't documented) and its limited subset of HTML might stretch the definition of "web browser" a little.

I remember a couple of people making websites specifically for these apps. Wasn't super common, but there were definitely a few Nintendo forums and communities that were built with the 3DS browser's viewport and design in mind.

And while there's nothing official, there are ways to use the built in Switch browser like a normal browser through homebrew as well. I think one setup even allows functionality the default browser doesn't support, like normal HTML video tags.

My first experience with porn was the Dreamcast browser.

I am surprised how deeply rooted Macromedia flash was.

For a console browser to chug Flash is impressive.

I remember the Wii U browser’s MP4 playback being surprisingly helpful. Running the `http-server` npm package, I was able to get video from my laptop to the TV in a pinch.

Adding in Handbrake, it wasn’t that bad of a setup!