Opera Turbo
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Opera's Coast iOS browser gets faster, smarter and more social
The Coast browser from Opera has come a long way since its early days on the iPhone, and it's about to get better. Not to be confused with Opera Mini, Opera Coast is a mobile browser focused on providing users quick access to their favorite websites, sporting a tile-based user interface and the ability to support multiple homes screens -- which makes it feel slightly like a mini OS. Today, Opera's bringing a few new things to the Coast app, including its trademark Turbo data-compressing tool for speedier browsing. Furthermore, Opera Coast is getting a Discover feature that easily finds stories related to the topics you're searching for, while a newly added button lets you share those links with friends on email, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. To round things up, Coast is now friendly with Apple's Continuity trait when browsing, allowing you to pick up right where you left off from any device, so long as you're on iOS 8 and have Handoff enabled.
Video: Opera 10 promises Turbo browsing using Scandinavian flat-packing knowhow
We've got to hand it to the kids at Opera who somehow manage to maintain relevance while battling Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla for browser market-share. Opera 10 is now available for download featuring a redesigned UI, a resizable tab bar with Visual Tab thumbnail previews of each loaded page, and Opera Link synchronization for keeping bookmarks and more synchronized between all your Opera devices. It's biggest feature, however, is Opera Turbo: a new compression technology that Ikea flat-packs web pages for fast transport over slow connections. See it demonstrated in the video after the break.
Opera commercializes its server-side web compression with Opera Turbo
Part of the reason why Opera Mini is so dang good at what it does -- provide desktop-esque web experiences to devices with limited horsepower and bandwidth -- is because Opera has become really good at acting as a proxy, compressing each and every nugget of data before it's sent down to the phone. The company's now looking to capitalize on that expertise, announcing its Opera Turbo initiative that's being pitched to both carriers and device manufacturers as an easy way to reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 80 percent. We love you, Opera, but if this gives carriers a good excuse to delay 4G rollouts, we hate you.
