iPhone users who have had enough of Safari, Chrome, Mercury, Dolphin, and Puffin, have a whole new alternative now in the form of Opera Coast, a mobile web browser that promises to take browser wars to a new level.
More than half a year after Opera launched the Coaster browser for iPad, the same revolutionary app makes its way to the iPhone. The iPad version was described as an “elegant, intuitive and refined” solution, and the iPhone one shouldn’t be any different.
Huib Kleinhout, Opera Coast project product manager, mentioned in a statement that “Like everyone who owns an iPhone, I’ve often picked it up when waiting for something or someone. I was never quite happy with how apps and browsers kind of got in the way of the content.”
In other words, Kleinhout sees other apps and browsers as an obstacle that prevents people from accessing the content easily. Obviously, in his eyes, Opera Coast represents the very solution to that problem. “The first true made-for-touch,” as the Norwegian developers from Opera called Coast, relies solely on gestures, thus eliminating the need for button-pressing and menu-tapping. Unlike other browsers that promise to innovate and actually fail to bring something new to the table, Opera Coast is indeed revolutionary, specifically because of this reason.
The UI of Opera Coast pretty much emulates the one of the iPhone itself, with three-by-three blocks. Right after launching the app, users get to see the icons for Gmail, YouTube, Reddit, BuzzFeed, Digg, IMDb, and Wikipedia, which in Opera’s opinion are some of the websites that most people access on a somehow daily basis.
When searching for websites that have mobile versions, Opera Coast offers the option of adding a thumbnail. If you’d rather look for an actor you like, Coast will display the Google search page without leaving the app. Kleinhout even explained that “With Opera Coast, we have made content the main star of the show, letting the browser app itself get out of the way when you just want to kill some time. It’s the way the Web was meant to be enjoyed.”
Overall, it’s great to take a breath of fresh air in the mobile Web browsers world, even if they are only meant for iOS users at the moment. Hopefully, Opera will decide to implement these for Android, as well.
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