Graphics power and gameplay aside, one point of comparison we've been hearing for the PS3 and Wii are their browsers. With that in mind, AZ central decided to run some tests on what features each browsers had/lacked. Here are the results:

Straight out for the box:
The Wii's Opera Beta came out Friday last week, and while it's still going to need some tweaking, it's a good point of comparison to the PS3's relatively fresh browser.

Speed:
The Wii's browser was notedly fast, and allowed for updates like Ajax or Flash. For the net dudes, this means sites like YouTube and maps.google are accessible. The PS3 didn't fare so well in the comparison. They noted that the browser was constantly asking whether the user would like to open other apps (like Javascript).

Interface:
The Wiimote stood out in this test, as its motion controls gave the very familiar feel of a PC's mouse. And while trying to punch in characters with the Wiimote was still slow work, the SIXAXIS was even more sluggish.

HD:
This was where the Wii had problems. While the hassle of having to open a separate page to enter a URL will be fixable, the browser's low-res isn't. Nintendo's packaged the Wii with no HD support (it's locked at 480), so high-definition sites were noted to be blurry. And while page zooming cures this problem, it's still clunky.

Final verdict:
While both browsers were fun to work with post-gaming, they still needed a lot of work. PC fans can relax, as your chosen machine's secure in the corner of your room.

We don't know if you'll ever meet a guy who is claiming that the Playstation 3 browser is somewhere between that of a mobile device and a regular desktop. Well, we did - not in person, but through his online site Design215. He's Robert Giordano. His claims, if we may add, were not caused by moments of loneliness and hundreds of PS3 units stolen. Giordano has a little experiment to back them up.

First, he stated that the console uses a version of the NetFront Browser as its web browser - the very same software mainly used on mobile devices like phones and pocket PCs. He then began with a document object model. According to Giordano, he created a test page that "displays the user-agent and HTTP-accept headers sent to the server, and if JavaScript is available, loops through the list of supported mime types and plugins."

The result? The PS3 apparently does not send an HTTP-accept header to the server. It supports Javascript but he will not divulge which version. Despite that, the console reports no mime types, no plugins, and no Javascript errors. He then proceeded with a couple more of tests that concern DHTML layers, AJAX Support, as well as Flash Support.

Some worked fine, but others didn't. It was quite funny that Giordano was delighted to know YouTube works. The details of the experiment can be viewed via the Read link below. But because we love you, here's a summary of Giordano's work:

• Framesets and iframes are not supported. The browser will attempt to open some framesets in separate windows but the results are less than desirable. This is bad news for people who use hidden iframes for their Web 2.0 apps.
• CSS2 seems well supported and Standards compliant pages look good, especially if they are XHTML 1.0.
• Javascript is somewhat supported but there doesn't seem to be any AJAX support.
• Certain events are missing (as they would be on mobile devices) like "onkeydown" and so on.
• Using "for(x in y)" to loop through the properties of a Javascript object doesn't work but you can test for the existence of individual properties.
• Dynamically loading external Javascript files after the page has loaded doesn't seem to work. More bad news for Web 2.0 apps.
• When using the on-screen keypad, the browser will add a space after each word. It does this on password fields as well, which can cause a bit of frustration if you don't remove the extra space at the end before you try to log in. I discovered this trying to log in to Gmail.