I don’t recall all the names, but one that stands out is “Freedom.” Steve spent some time trying that one out on all of us. Which is not as odd as it seemed then - it’s a good technique now that I think about it. This is purely an experiment for Opera to improve upon current mobile browsing UI with a chrome-less approach, not the underlying rendering technologies.ĭon Melton, a now-retired programmer who once worked at Apple under the Safari and WebKit projects, posted an interesting anecdote on his blog yesterday that detailed how Apple’s Internet browser barely escaped the monikers “iBrowse,” “Alexander”, and even “Freedom”.Īs I remember, Steve just started saying some names out loud - I suppose trying them out to see how they felt in his mouth and to his ears. Interestingly, unlike Opera’s other attempts at mobile browsers, Coast relies on iOS’ native WebKit engine to display pages. In fact, in contrast to the minimalist UI, Coast’s animations are flamboyant, arguably to an unnecessary extreme.
In particular, the tab closing animation (where the page is ‘eaten’ by the top lip of the app’s background) is stunning to see in motion.
The home screen of Coast is similarly barebones, with a discreet URL bar at the top of the screen and app-like buttons below representing the users’ bookmarks.Ĭoast employs some very nice animations throughout, making the app feel very playful. All focus is given to the current web page. In fact, as shown in the above screenshot, Coast opts not to show the URL bar at all. Gestures control page navigation, with edge swipes standing in for a traditional back button. One button opens tabs (which are metaphorically represented in the UI as pages, similar to Safari on the iPhone) and the other button takes you “home”. When looking at a web page, there is no onscreen chrome except for a single, thin bar that runs along the bottom of the screen. Opera has just launched Coast for iPad, a full-screen web browser for tablets.
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