The new browser relies heavily on gestures for control

Sep 9, 2013 14:52 GMT  ·  By

Opera's long-touted iPad-only browser is here. The Norwegian browser company has made mobile devices its biggest focus; yet, so far, it hasn't had too much to show for it. There's the new WebKit-based Opera for smartphones, a nice evolution of the Opera Mobile browser, but nothing we haven't seen before.

But the company has been promising something different, a new browser built for touch, one which reimagines the way we interact with browsers based on the capabilities of modern mobile devices.

That browser has now been released and it even has a new name, Coast, the first time Opera has named its browser anything other than, well, Opera.

"Websites and apps today invite you to interact in new ways, but browsers have been stuck in a keyboard-and-mouse world. They felt outdated, and that bothered us. Why? Because we make browsers for a living. We are passionate about making the internet better," Opera's Huib Kleinhout wrote.

"Look, I knew we could do better. A lot better. For me, that meant rethinking what a browser should be. We saw a great opportunity to build something from scratch. Made simple and elegant. The result is a completely new browser, designed for your iPad," he added.

Coast eschews the traditional UI in favor of gesture-based interactions. Opera has a history with gestures, the old desktop browser offered great support for mouse gestures, so it is perhaps fitting that it is the one completely revamping the browsing experience on touch-screen devices.

Of course, given the limitations of iOS, Opera was forced to innovate in the user interface and experience area, since no iOS app can bundle a custom HTML engine.

Beyond the actual browser, Opera is also encouraging developers to adopt this new style of browsing and native touch controls. There are ways of supporting touch gestures in standard HTML and it makes for a significantly improved experience on mobile devices.