:: BROWSER FOR EVERYONE :: BROWSER FOR EVERYONE :: Read Review »Tech Crunch reports that Opera Software has been hard at work on a made-for-iPad web browser for the past year and a half, and now they're finished. Coast by Opera is specifically an iPad web browser, not a computer browser tossed onto Apple's tablet. What this means is that the app has been optimized for use on iOS.
Specifically, that equates to a re-imagined interface. About the only buttons you'll find are one to go back to the Home page and one to bring up your recent History. Pretty much everything else is gesture-based such as swiping left and right to go back or forward a page, and a home screen similar to the familiar iOS interface that will display large icons for favorite sites as well as recently-visited ones to make bookmarking a lot simpler.
So if you've got an iPad and are looking for an intuitive web browser with a minimal interface, go ahead and give Coast a download.
Opera Mini seems to be an application that was built just because they could do it. It's really only useful for a small number of people -- those that only have access to really bad Edge data. And it needs to be really bad to make Opera Mini useful. The goal of Opera Mini is to speed up the rendering of web pages by doing all of the hard work on the server and then sending down low bandwidth images to the client on your iPhone. And, in theory it works, but in practice, not so much.
In my tests over the last few hours I had a hard time finding a web site that rendered correctly. Most were missing large chunks or just didn't function at all. One of the main features is that all javascript, the code that lets web pages do interactive things, is executed on the server. But the result is that this pretty much breaks any web page that has any javascript.
The plus is that Opera Mini is free to download, and does have some interesting features. The 3x3 grid of quick launch web sites called Speed Dial is great. The zooming and scrolling is wickedly fast. But overall, if a page doesn't render properly, how useful is it?
