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Opera Coast 4.0: Now a touch-friendly web experience

In the grand scheme of things, one doesn’t really pay attention to web browsers besides the usual Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari. With these often pre-installed on computers or devices, users rarely feel the need to move away from them. Unless of course they’re looking for newer features, or encounter particularly adverse browsing experiences. But all web browsers are, at the end of the day, largely alike, right? Well not really.

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A portal to a large part of your web experience, browsers--and their inherent functionality--are often taken for granted. Hidden behind the simple window with the address bar up top, resides a ton standards and software capabilities that work in concert toward making your browsing sessions secure, glitch-free and increasingly interactive. It is in these are that the real differences in web browsers exist--depending on the standards that each supports and the frameworks they are built around, some have proved to be more secure than others, with the ability to render sites more faithfully and glitch-free.
 
On these grounds, there’s one browser that has, for the large part, always figured among the most robust--Opera. Released way back in Norway in 1995 (many of the veteran internet users would recall Opera Mini, which was very popular on Nokia’s Symbian-based mobiles back in the 90s), it was one of the first to the game, and introduced numerous features that are now par for the course in other browsers: tabbed browsing, complete adherence for the W3C web standards, speed dial (advanced bookmark management) and more.
 

 
Very recently, we got our hands on Opera’s brand new take on web browsing: it’s called Opera Coast 4.0, and it re-imagines the web browsing with an emphasis on touch-based control, full-bleed site rendering, intuitive transitions, and a more in-the-face web experience.
 

 
Fire up the Coast and the first thing you see is a screen containing a grid of tiles that depict popular web destinations like YouTube, Buzzfeed, Facebook et al. Tapping these (and you can add your own here) and the tile flips and transitions to loading the website. The first thing you notice when viewing a website on this browser is that the page is almost full-bleed--it almost entirely takes up the full screen space--no address bar or navigation buttons. Instead, and here’s the intuitive part, you navigate by simply swiping. Pull the page off the screen to the right and you move back, pull it down past a point (there’s an icon at the top that visually guides) and the page refreshes. The only navigation elements on the screen are three icons at the bottom. At the left is an arrow that when tapped opens the sharing tool (share page to email, social etc), a grid icon in the center that takes you back to the home screen with the tiled shortcuts, and a set of three dots on the right that opens a carousel of your recently-viewed sites. It’s all really intuitive--the more you swipe left, right, up, or down, the quicker you learn the lay of the land--pages can be closed, reloaded, moved or bookmarked.
 

 
At its core, Opera Coast contains much of the technology that differentiated it--key being the Turbo feature that pre-compresses pages at their servers before delivering it to mobile devices: a particularly important feature in the mobile world where cellular Internet usage costs can quickly mount.
 

 
Along the way, there are other nuggets of information that keep cropping up: for example, a site safety indication when you reload the page from the carousel view, or a list of suggested topics when you’re in the search bar. Opera Coast delivers a fresh, visual Web experience that is easy to get used to. There were stray instances where pages did not render as expected (misaligned images and the like), but these were rare enough to be forgotten.
 
Right now it’s only available on iOS (support for other platforms are in the works, we’re told), and you can grab it free from iTunes. After you’ve had a go at it, be sure to tell us what you think about it in the comments here or on Twitter @dna

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