Opera presents Ice – A New Browser for iOS and Android

Norwegians at Opera Software ASA, producers of the famous namesake, announced that it will launch at the Mobile World Congress 2013 a new browser for Android and iOS mobile devices, they wanted to make a better interface and enable the company to obtain a better place in market browsers for mobile platforms.

Strangely, the future Opera Ice will not be based on Presto rendering engine used by all company products. Compared to Opera, Opera Mobile or Opera Mini, the future product will use WebKit, the best explanation is probably the failure of running a graphics engine stranger to the iOS platform and the desire of a unique focus on multiplatform development.

At the interface, where Opera hopes to bring something new to a lack of standard interfaces, navigation is carried out only through gestures. The known Speed Dial list will be the focus of the product, which provides access to both the known list of favorite sites and open tabs. The unique button allows switching between the current page and home page, the new Speed Dial allows further search or manually entering an address.

According to Opera, the future Ice will not replace the Opera Mini product, made for those struggling with low bandwidth and need optimized versions of web pages. At this point it is not considered a variant of Opera Ice browser for Windows Phone, but we’ll find out more details next month.