Opera is taking direct aim at one of mobile browsing’s biggest headaches: the endless sprawl of open tabs, especially for iPhone users living inside Safari. The latest Opera One for iOS update rolls out a redesigned tab system built to help people find, group, and switch between pages faster, signaling a clear play for users who juggle work, shopping, and research across dozens (or hundreds) of tabs.
What’s new in Opera’s tab system
The update brings desktop-style control to mobile. You can toggle between compact list and visual grid views, making it easier to scan many tabs at once or prioritize information density. Tabs can be clustered into color-coded groups so separate projects—say, a flight search, a client deck, and a recipe rabbit hole—stay neatly segmented.
A new search box sits atop the tab view, instantly filtering open pages by words in the title or URL. That speeds up recovery when you remember the topic but not the site. Opera also added a swipeable strip to jump among regular tabs, private tabs, and synced tabs from other devices, cutting the friction of cross-context switching.
Opera’s product team frames the move as embracing tab overload rather than fighting it: if people won’t close tabs, give them stronger tools to control the chaos. It’s a pragmatic stance that mirrors how many of us actually browse on phones.
How it compares to Safari on iPhone
Safari isn’t short on features. Apple offers Tab Groups, shared groups for collaboration, a grid overview with search, and an option to auto-close tabs after a day, week, or month. iCloud Tabs shows pages open on your other devices. For most people, those tools are enough—until they’re not.
Opera’s pitch is about visibility and speed. The list layout packs more titles on screen than Safari’s card-style grid, the color labels give each group a visual anchor, and the universal tab search feels more front-and-center. Synced tabs are presented as a first-class destination rather than a tucked-away list, which can reduce the taps between your phone and laptop.
Example: imagine researching a city break. In Safari, you might bounce between a tab group for flights and another for hotels, then scroll through a lattice of cards to find that one fare comparison page. In Opera, a quick filter for “MUC” or “nonstop” narrows the list immediately, while the color tag for “Travel” keeps the whole effort visually bundled.
Why tab overload matters
Mobile screens compress attention. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group has long shown that chunking related items and improving scannability lowers cognitive load and retrieval time. In browser terms, that means clearer group boundaries, predictable layouts, and fast search can translate directly to minutes saved each day.
There’s also a market reality. StatCounter’s global data shows Safari and Chrome dominate mobile browsing, with Safari in the mid-to-high 20% range and Opera in low single digits. Winning share against a default browser on iOS requires a sharp, tangible advantage. If tab management is the pain people feel most often, that’s a smart wedge.
Beyond tabs: personalization and AI
Opera didn’t stop at tabs. The main menu is now customizable, letting you pin the controls and actions you use most. That matters on mobile, where buried options might as well not exist.
The browser’s Aria assistant has been moved to a prominent button centered on the bottom bar for one-tap access. Opera says Aria routes requests across multiple large models, including GPT‑4o and Gemini 2.0 depending on the task. It’s a continuation of a broader trend in browsers—think Microsoft Edge’s Copilot or Arc’s Boosts—where search, page summarization, and writing help are integrated into the chrome rather than confined to a website.
The iOS constraint—and why UI still wins
On iPhone, every third‑party browser uses Apple’s WebKit engine, which levels performance and standards support. That means differentiation happens at the interface layer—how tabs are organized, how features surface, and how quickly you can get back to what you were doing. Regulatory shifts in Europe may loosen engine rules in specific markets, but for most users today, UI is the battlefield.
There’s also the gravity of defaults: many users never change their browser. Still, when a feature directly relieves an everyday nuisance, behavior can shift. Password managers, reader modes, and content blockers all spread that way—quietly, by solving immediate problems better than the default option.
Bottom line
If your Safari tab view has become a maze—and auto‑close feels more like a band‑aid than a cure—Opera’s new grouping, search, and layout options are worth a look. The update doesn’t just add features; it reorganizes mobile browsing around the way people actually work, which is to keep everything open and demand faster ways to find it.
