Most of the experience is funneled down to swipes and taps for the smoothest browsing for example, instead of using forward or backward buttons, you just swipe left or right. Navigating Coast is intuitive, and it took only seconds to get the hang of. Immediately noticeable is that the browser offers more space to use on the iPad screen. Everything has been stripped-URL fields, forward and back buttons, the settings bar, tabs-which leaves more room for the actual website content. This “Speed Dial” is a collection of favorited sites, which are presented as visually appealing icons rather than conventional text-only bookmarks. At first launch, Coast resembles an iPhone home-screen in a familiar way. “Dare to challenge, and dare to think big,” Kleinhout says, “That’s the kind of culture at Opera.” He locked himself and a small team of designers and developers into a meeting room and focused on one main goal: “I wanted to make something for the internet as it is today.”Ī year and a half later, the team finished Coast, and Cool Hunting recently had the opportunity to preview and test the app. As soon as he presented the project to a higher manager, it was an immediate green light. Kleinhout started developing this concept on his own, in secret, for several months, giving up vacations and evenings. All of those are remaining from the old times.” Kleinhout wanted to break the traditional method of scaling-down or scaling-up browsers, and create something specifically for the iPad. It was time to start ditching old legacies, the elements of the browser that are just historical, from the address field to the back and forward buttons and bookmarks.

Not only Opera but all browsers-Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer-they all very much look the same. It was a simple idea that suddenly struck one of Opera’s designers, Huib Kleinhout: “I realized that we were kind of stuck in the browser world.

But building a browser for a tablet from scratch wasn’t planned in advance by the company.

Coast by opera web browser