Opera is putting browser tabs on a leash, targeting one of the biggest mobile browsing frustrations: the infinite sprawl of open tabs you get when you use iPhones that are poked and prodded by Safari. The latest release also introduces a revised tab setup, as Opera One for iOS aims to assist inung people (and particularly when they have a job, shopping and research to sort through) find, group and flick between pages more quickly –a clear play for people who juggle dozens, if not hundreds of tabs.
What’s new in Opera’s tab feature
Desktop-style control comes to mobile with this update. You can switch between a compact list view and a visual grid view, allowing you to quickly forage through a bunch of tabs at once or pack in all of the information density. Tabs can be grouped by color so different projects — a flight search, a client deck, a recipe rabbit hole — remain nice and separate.
A new search box placed above the tab view filters open pages instantly by words in the title or the URL. That speeds up recovery if you remember the topic and not the site. Opera also built in a swipeable strip to jump between regular tabs, private tabs and synced tabs from other devices, which reduced the friction of moving cross-contextually 1-to-1.
Opera’s product team is positioning the move as an embrace of tab overload, rather than a fight against it: if people won’t close tabs, we’ll empower them with more powerful tools to manage the chaos. It’s a practical stance that reflects how a lot of us actually scroll on phones.
How it’s different from Safari on iPhone
Safari isn’t short on features. Apple provides Tab Groups, shared groups for collaboration, a grid overview with search and the ability to auto-delete tabs after a day, week or month. iCloud Tabs shows webpages you have open on other devices. For most people, such tools are sufficient — until they aren’t.
Visibility and speed is Opera’s pitch. The list layout can show more titles on screen at once compared with Safari’s card-style grid, the colored labels provide each group with a visual anchor, and the universal tab search feels more front-and-center as well. Synced tabs are now first-class citizens rather than a buried list, anything that helps cuts down on the number of taps between my phone and laptop is welcome.
Example: consider researching a city break. In Safari, you might be bouncing between a group of tabs for flights and group for hotels, then scrolling through a lattice of colorful cards to land on a fare comparison page. In Opera, a quick filter for “MUC” or “nonstop” will narrow down this list immediately, and tagging them with “Travel” in any color will visually keep the whole project bundled.
Why tab overload matters
Mobile screens compress attention. Studies by the Nielsen Norman Group have for so long indicated that by chunking related items and enhances scannability, the cognitive load and retrieval time decreases. In browser language, clearer group boundaries, more predictable layouts and faster searching can equate to minutes saved every day.
There’s also a market reality. Global safari and Chrome are by far the leaders in mobile with safari in the mid to high 20’s and Opera in the low single digits safari and Chrome have a virtual duopoly on mobile usage per StatCounter. Beating back share versus a built-in browser on iOS demands a clear, tangible winning feature. If tab management is the pain they feel most often, that’s a smart wedge.
Beyond tabs: personalization and AI
Opera didn’t stop at tabs. The core menu is tweaked now, so you can assign the controls and moves you use most. That counts on mobile, where hidden options may as well be invisible.
Two of the actions in the browser’s Aria assistant are moved over to a more accessible button centered in the bottom bar for one-tap access. According to Opera, Aria can route requests through various large models, such as GPT‑4o and Gemini 2.0, depending on the request. It’s part of a larger remodeling of the broader browser experience — think Microsoft Edge’s Copilot or Arc’s Boosts — where search, page summarization and writing assistance are brought into the chrome itself versus confined to a website.
The iOS constraint — and why UI still wins
On the iPhone, every third‑party browser uses Apple’s WebKit engine, so performance and standards support are a level playing field. That means differentiation takes place at the interface layer—how tabs are arranged, how features are exposed, and how easily you can get back to doing what you were doing. Regulatory changes in Europe may ease engine rules in certain markets, but for most users today, UI is the battlefield.
There is also the gravity of defaults: many users never switch their browser. But if a feature directly solves a ritualistic irritation, behavior can change. Password managers, Quoty McQuoterson, reader modes and content blockers all spread that way — quietly, by solving the correct immediate problem better than the default option.
Bottom line
If your Safari tab view has spiraled out of control —and auto‑close seems like more of a band‑aid than a cure—Opera’s new grouping, search, and layout options might catch your eye.
The update isn’t just a new set of features; it’s a reorganization of mobile browsing around the way people actually work — which is to keep everything open and ask for quicker routes to it.
