Web browsing on the iPad can be frustrating of an experience for what's really one of the device's most basic uses. Safari for iOS was designed with an iPhone in mind, so anything larger becomes an awkward mix of sweeping gestures and pointed tapping. Opera wants to fix that.
Opera is no stranger to the mobile web, as it's been building browsers for phones and tablets for years. About a year and a half ago, the team at Opera started working on a new browser for tablets and today, on September 9th, 2013, the company is launching the result of this project: Opera Coast, a new, almost chrome-less browser for the iPad.
Huib Kleinhout, the head of the Coast project at Opera said that the new web-browsing app was born out of the frustration that browsers really haven't changed all that much since the days of Mosaic, even though the devices people use to browse the web with have changed. With the advent of multi-touch and tablets, Kleinhout believes, browsers also need to change and Coast is Opera's first attempt at building a new tablet-optimized browser.
"People don't use the browser as a power tool," Kleinhout said about how people use browsers on their tablets. The idea behind Coast is to remove most of the complexities, and often the unnecessary user interface elements of today's modern browsers.
Coast is constructed specifically for the iPad and seeks to make browsing the internet feel the same as using an app. When launched, Coast shows a tiled grid of favorites that users can set (default is nine). Upon returning to home from a site, the icon tile of that last-visited page shows up beneath your favorites. Coast also takes a page from the webOS playbook by providing browsing history as a series of panes that are tapped for access or swiped upwards to be deleted.
The series of swipeable home screens and a tile-based use interface that makes all favorite websites look like icons. Coast differentiate itself from Chrome browser by showing small home and history button, instead of content, residing underneath whatever page it is showing.
Navigation forward and back is accomplished by swiping, and a customizable search bar sits on top of favorites. Essentially, Coast aims to be simple to use and to deliver web content in an unobtrusive, elegant way.
Coast features almost no user interface elements except for a home button at the bottom of the screen and a smaller button in the bottom right corner to show recently visited sites. Virtually all of the interaction with the browser happens through gestures.
Instead of regular bookmarks, Coast uses its own iOS-like homescreen with large icons for your most-visited sites. The browser also automatically adds a list of recently visited sites to the bottom of its home screen. The Opera's backend service allows automatically suggestion to up to three results as the user types.
The tab bar is also quite innovative, with each website offering quick and convenient buttons to share the page via Facebook, Twitter or email. Furthermore, a handy information button details the website and the level of its security.
Kleinhout noted that it shouldn't be the browser's job to show share buttons. Instead, the sites themselves should determine how users interact with them. Kleinhout also noted that the team looked at how to keep users safe without having them evaluate lots of icons in the browser’s URL bar. Instead of having to know what HTTPS is and how certificates work, Coast puts a very clear safety warning on the screen when it recognizes that the user is trying to access an unsafe site.
Unlike Opera Mini and the company's earliest attempts at launching iOS browsers, Coast does not use Opera's server-side rendering service and relies on Apple's own built-in rendering engine instead.
Coast is being described by Opera as "the browser that should have come with the iPad," and that means it has a stripped down user interface to only the most essential elements of browsing. On the other hand, Opera knows that all other buttons are there for a reason, so in Coast, they're not actually gone, they're just hidden from the user's sight to create a fully optimized browser for a touch controlled tablet, designed to make browsing faster, more productive and generally more enjoyable.