Opera Coast

~ the last words ~

Coast opened to a grid of large site icons on a dark background, and that was most of the interface. There was no address bar and no back button. You swiped left to go back and right to go forward, and typed into a single field that never distinguished a search from a URL because it did not need to. Opera shipped it for iPad on 9 september 2013 and said out loud that it was the browser that should have come with the device.

It began as one person's side project. Huib Kleinhout had been at Opera seven years when he decided that tablet browsers were still built around a keyboard and a mouse, and the company gave him about fifteen designers and engineers to prove otherwise. The result got reviewed the way good design gets reviewed, with the word "should" in most of the headlines. An iPhone version followed in april 2014.

Then not very much happened. Coast reached thirty-two languages and got a faster release in december 2013, and it never became a browser people told each other about.

I did not use it. Opera had already been the browser I kept declining for a decade by then, and Coast was iPad-only in a market where Apple forced every browser to run its rendering engine underneath anyway. What I take from it now is not regret about missing it. It is that Coast is one of the plainest cases available of a well-made thing losing to a worse default.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

Apple's rule was the ceiling. Any browser on iOS had to use the system WebKit, so Coast could not beat Safari on speed or on anything else a rendering engine decides. It could only be better arranged. That is a real thing to be, and it is not a thing that makes somebody change the app they open by reflex fifty times a day.

There was also nothing to describe. A browser with a novel interface has to be demonstrated, and demonstrations do not travel. Chrome spread because it was fast and because it was advertised on every Google page you already visited. Coast spread because you happened to read an article about it.

~ the postmortem ~

Opera cut heavily in Oslo in 2016, during the year it sold its browser business to a Chinese consortium, and small products with small teams do not survive that kind of year. Coast stopped getting updates. In august 2017 it disappeared from the App Store with no announcement and no blog post, which is how a product ends when there is nobody left inside the company who owns it.

People who already had it installed could keep redownloading it for a while afterward, which is the strangest afterlife software gets. It was never deleted, only made unfindable, and it kept working for everybody who had already chosen it.

~ the legacy ~

The ideas escaped even though the product did not. Full-screen browsing with the interface hidden until you reach for it, and a start page of large site tiles instead of a bookmark list, are ordinary now on every mobile browser including Safari. Coast argued for that in 2013 and was not the reason it happened, which is the usual fate of software that is early and small at the same time.

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