Opera Coast is a new browser from Opera, currently available for iPhone and iPad for free. In short, it’s a mobile browser with a new concept of user interface. Instead of having a lot of controls, most of its features are performed by touch gestures.
First, navigation is done by swiping. Right goes back, left goes forward. There’s a “home button” at the bottom of the browser screen and tapping it will bring us back to the “favorite screen”. It treats “favorite screen” as our home screen, similar to icons of apps in modern smartphones, and opening a favorite shortcut will feel like opening an app. Places we visited appear at the bottom of favorite screen. We can drag them into the array of icons in favorite screen. Or we can long-press an icon and drag it above to delete it.
The time required to open a webpage is slightly longer than usual (compared to Safari or Chrome in iPad). Once loaded, most pages are displayed correctly. We can quickly switch from a page to another by pressing a small button on the bottom-right. It brings up a display similar to app multitasking in modern OS. Again, this browser treats opened web pages as “apps” and the list of favorites as home screen, so it all fits well in a concept.
Interestingly, I could not find a way to “delete” a web page from the “multitasking” list. If there is actually a way to do that, it’s not intuitive enough for users.
In the end, it was a fun moment to play around and try new browser interface. For everyday browsing in my phone and tablet, I will probably go back to Safari though.
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