DS Internet Browser - 14 Years Later

[VGMoose]

The original and lite Nintendo DS had an Internet Browser on a cartridge in 2007. It came with an extra game pak that gave it additional memory to load web pages, that went into the GBA slot of the DS.

The game case:

Picture of the cartridges:

2007 was before smart phones were popular, and as a kid there weren't many options for going on the Internet, outside of stuff like a family computer or school. So in a lot of ways this browser was the only connection to the outside world. There was also stuff like: seeing friends online in Animal Crossing / other Wifi games, or basic SMS texting, but nothing like portable "real" Internet.

The browser itself had two modes, it could either work as displaying the full website on the bottom screen, with a zoom window that you could move around to read text on the top screen:

Or a more mobile-friendly mode (kind of like Reader view) where the page spanned both screens. This was better for reading text, but did break a lot of web pages.

The browser itself was a version of Opera, which at the time was pretty good at handling most web pages. This is similar to the Wii's browser, except it did not support Flash player (whereas the Wii did!). So stuff like videos and sound didn't work.

In particular one site that worked very well on it was the Smash Bros Dojo, where updates about Brawl were posted by Sakurai every week day.

It is kind of disappointing that the limitations of this 14 year old browser are not too dissimilar from the limitations of the Switch browser. But I've already talked about that a lot in the change.org petition, and how it compares to the 3DS/Wii U browsers.

Anyone else use this browser? Heard of this? There was a newer revision built into the DSi as well, but by the time the 3DS rolled around the browser switched over to WebKit (which is still used in the Switch).