Topic: Is The Wii U Browser Broken?

Is it just me or is the multiple tab feature completely broken and useless now? Everytime I switch tabs the page refreshes automatically causing me to lose all progress that I've made writing posts on my website. What the heck is going on?!

Nah. It does that on demanding or poorly optimized web pages. Wii U actually handles multiple tabs better than Xbox One, from my experience, because it actually attemps to run multiple tabs without refreshing. Reseting the internet data when the memory gets pretty packed and making sure the sites you go to often have the cookies will make things run better.

So, reset the data, then go back to the web pages you visit most often. That should solve it, unless your router or internet connection is unable to process all of that.

I've not had that problem, but I do think the Wii U browser is a bit slower than before... hope they patch it up.

Updating your route firmware will help, if you are using WiFi. I updated my router like 4 months ago, and that always keeps performance up to where it is supposed to be.

I don't really care. Sometimes, the "Like" button does not seem to work, and it takes like a minute to fully access a page. I guess that it has something to do with my Wi-Fi since it worked much better on a friend's Wii U. I still use it four hours a day for Youtube. I am able to have five tabs of Youtube videos to watch back-to-back!

i dont think its broken, just not as good as a desktop browser. mine is using ethernet through a usb to ethernet adapter(Not Nintendo`s official adapter, that thing is slow) and im getting below 3 second page load times and sometimes even less than one on lighter web pages. i can stream 1080p on youtube no problem and it seems just fine. even competitive to a modern tablet. it does have limited RAM, only 512MB dedicated for the browser i guess so it cant take too many tabs

I don't understand why people keep saying this. It's demonstrably false.

well, i did a benchmark with both the official and 3rd party ethernet adapter downloading PIKMIN Short Movies HD. the result i ended up with was 10 minutes for the 3rd party and 12 minutes for the official adapter so i guess i underestimated it. its weird because i remember using the official adapter and complaining about the speed so i dont know why its so much better this time. maybe a firmware update increased its speed or the server was overloaded when i used the official adapter.

testin both on my pc shows that they were both able to handle my bandwidth of 46Mbps and were identical to the point of using the exact same ASIX chipset and the exact same hardware ID. they were virtually the same device. i must admit i was wrong about the official adapter, a lot of people claimed it was based on USB 1.1 which is evidently wrong based on my testing and i personally experienced it as being slower than my Wi-Fi so i assumed it was USB 1.1.

that said i still prefer 3rd party adapters for being cheaper, smaller, having status LED`s and (dependent on manufacturer) matching the deluxe Wii U`s black finish. the official adapter looks really out of place besides a black Wii U

That's about the sort of variability you'd expect to see anyways from two downloads. Margin of error sort of stuff.

From very, very early on when I used my adapter I've been able to do things with it that you wouldn't be able to if it was as slow as people claimed. For example streaming high res trailers across my local network within the Wii U's browser. Scrubbing through the video and having it instantly catch up. If it was USB 1.1 as some claimed it wouldn't have been able to. It has been the same since day 1, nothing has changed.

Yes, a lot of people for some reason think it's USB 1.1. No idea why, it doesn't make any sense at all. Even if it was a "it's stuck in tech back when the Wii lauched" thing, USB 2.0 and Fast Ethernet were both very cheap and very ubiquitous in 2006. Had been for years. So much so that it would have probably cost them extra to be that far behind the curve. From memory I'd say that by late 2004, two years before the Wii launched, USB 2.0 was common enough that you could carry around a thumbdrive and expect that any PC you'd come across would support it at full speed. Very, very, very mainstream stuff well before the Wii's launch.

I think a lot of the "it's slow" thing is a bit of confirmation bias. People for whatever reason thought it was slow, because they have it in their head that "Wii = seriously out of date" or something. Who knows. Then when they're using the eShop, the eShop being the eShop, it sometimes performs slow. When it does perform slow? Oh, it must be the adapter because people have said it's USB 1.1! When it performs slow on WiFi? Well, obviously it's the eShop or my connection or something else. But nobody actually bothers to test it.