Browsing the web on a games console from 2006: what could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, almost—but not quite—everything.
Introducing the Wii Internet Channel
First, a reminder, because even if you were there at the time, you’ve probably forgotten most things about the Wii beyond Mario Kart and Wii Sports. Yes, it offered more besides these games; even more than the Switch does today, by some measures.
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The Wii’s home menu riffed on a TV metaphor, with a grid of screen-shaped channels to handle all tasks, from playing a game to checking on the weather. One of these channels—introduced just after launch—was the Internet Channel, a version of the Opera browser adapted to the console.
The Internet Channel uses a direct connection via your router, so there’s no involvement of Nintendo-owned servers during this process. In theory, this means that it cannot be shut off, so the software should continue to function. Let’s see if that theory pans out in practice.
Booting Up a Wii for Web Browsing in 2025
The first challenge facing me was a hardware one. Having dragged my old Wii out of the attic, and dusted it off, I needed to plug it into a TV. The Wii used a composite cable, which is pretty old-fashioned by today’s standards.
This cable has three connectors, colored red, white, and yellow; most modern TVs lack the ports needed to plug these in. Fortunately, my TV is old enough to support this standard, so booting up my Wii for the first time in well over a decade was a straightforward process.
Since I hadn’t ever used the Wii with my current router (or even in my current house!), I had to go through the process of setting up a new connection, but that worked flawlessly. Finally, I had to get hold of the Internet Channel itself. For some reason, this wasn’t available to me initially, but I could still add the channel since I’d downloaded it previously.
To get hold of the Internet Channel, simply open up the Wii Shop, bathe in that glorious eShop music, then navigate to “Titles You’ve Already Downloaded.” Locate the channel, then download it:
Trying Out Simple Text Sites
I began by trying the simplest possible sites I could think of. The first was example.com, a reserved domain intended for documentation and similar uses. This site hosts a very basic, text-only page with inline styles and no JavaScript. As such, it stood the best chance of succeeding—and it did:
I tried another simple site, Txti. Although the site just displays a “retirement” message, it’s still accessible using the Wii, so there was hope for other text-based sites.
Entering URLs with the Wii Remote can be a laborious process, but plugging in a USB keyboard helps an awful lot. Even my Mac Magic keyboard was recognized, although it’s an older lightning-to-USBA model.
Unfortunately, I was less successful with other simple sites, like Hacker News or lobste.rs, which both refused me. Craigslist was another I held out some hope for, but it also failed to load.
Browsing More Complex Sites
Next, I checked out the Favorites list. This confirmed that I’d made very little use of the Internet Channel before, but a handful of sites was present, possibly by default. Yahoo was a no-go, but Google looked quite promising:
Search result links, however, go via a Google proxy URL, so accessing them requires a bit of editing. But, even accessing URLs directly was often doomed to failure, with a message reading “Handshake failed because the server does not want to accept the enabled SSL/TLS protocol versions.”
BBC iPlayer also looked quite promising, if not exactly error-free. Accessing the site presented a host of warning messages about expired certificates, and the final screen looked far from perfect:
However, it did manage to load and even let me navigate to individual shows, fueling hope that something useful could arise from the experiment. Ultimately, though, there was no way of controlling the video player, so I couldn’t actually view any video footage at all.
Wikipedia was another site that I thought had promise, given its text-focused nature and its very broad appeal. Sadly, it too suffered from security errors. Most of these errors were caused by sites requiring the newer TLS protocol. The Wii’s Internet Channel supported SSL 3.0, and this version of the Opera browser was never upgraded to support TLS, so many modern websites are inaccessible.
Are There Any Workarounds?
It’s safe to say that browsing the web on your Wii in 2025 is far from satisfactory. Even if you restrict yourself to the most basic sites, it’s a very hit-and-miss affair. Probably your best bet is to use a “dumb proxy” like FrogFind to fetch sites on your behalf:
FrogFind works pretty well on the Wii because of its approach to backward compatibility. The site is a search engine, but instead of linking directly to each result, it proxies results through its own engine. As a result, FrogFind serves you a simpler version of each result, without all the trimmings that can cause older browsers to fail.
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Since FrogFind handles secure connections to each site, the certificate errors that plagued my earlier attempts were also no longer present. Each site is downgraded as a result, so this approach is probably not suitable for any remotely complicated web apps like iPlayer or Bluesky, but if you must browse the internet on a Wii in 2025, it at least gives you a fighting chance.
