Opera’s browser roster is expanding once more, and this time, AI is at the centre of its world. Opera Neon is a fully agentic AI browser that can surf the web and code games for you—or at least, cut down on the admin of life and leave you more time for the actual fun stuff you really enjoy.

What Is Opera Neon?

Opera Neon promises a new dawn for web browsing, and a big step forward for AI agents and mass adoption. Your browser can now take care of tasks in the background, largely completely automated, leaving you free to get on with other tasks.

So, instead of having to sit and find, say, train tickets for your upcoming journey or a booking for a restaurant in a couple of days, you can prompt Opera Neon to do the work for you. Once prompted, Opera Neon gets to work, only coming back to you when it needs ultimate confirmation, i.e., complete a booking with your final overview.

Opera Neon can fully understand web pages, operating natively in your browser. It doesn’t send data to a remote server for analysis, instead using a document object model (DOM) tree to work through pages in a logical, hierarchical manner. In that, Neon can understand the context of a web page, including its fiddly forms, and respond accurately.

However, Opera also says that Neon can work offline and process your requests in a virtual machine running in the cloud. So, you can request Opera Neon to work on a prompt, close your computer, and head off. When you come back, Neon will have processed the request and delivered the information you need.

Neon employs AI agents that work beyond the browser–in a virtual machine hosted in the cloud–and can continue working on the users’ creation even when they go offline. Opera Neon users can, for example, ask the browser to make a game, a report, a snippet of code, or even a website–it will research, design, and build whatever users need.

So, at its core, Opera Neon will operate like a regular browser. You’ll still use it to browse the web as usual. There is just now the extra AI-centric focus that should make your whole life more streamlined, and that’s something everyone should be interested in.

Opera’s Browser Operator Comes to Life

I was lucky enough to be shown a preview version of Opera’s Neon browser at its Browser Days 2025 event in Lisbon, Portugal. To clarify, Opera never requests specific coverage of these events, and this is the first time I’m writing about Browser Operator and Opera Neon.

It’s interesting to see how much Browser Operator has developed from the world’s first preview we were shown in Lisbon to a fully-fledged agentic AI browser.

The first outing for the Browser Operator, the Opera Neon’s core AI agentic tech, actually worked surprisingly well, considering it was its first live demo. The AI agent successfully ordered a bouquet for one of the other journalists on the trip, although it required a gentle prod to get it over the line—with some understandable nervous laughter from the Opera development team.

Nonetheless, the flowers arrived the next day, bought by the AI, with the bare minimum of interaction from the Opera team.

Now, Opera has taken it a step further. Opera Neon pulls elements from its existing Aria AI, which can already read from and interact with webpages in the Opera Browser and use features like its AI-powered tab commands, and Browser Operator adds a new level of automation to the process.

Having watched the latest demos of Opera Neon, it seems more competent than its fledgling demo earlier in 2025.

One of the main talking points after the original demo was, “But I can probably do this faster.” It was a fair point. I’d previously tried to use an AI agentic tool (not Opera’s Browser Operator, I should note) to book a train ticket, and it took a long time and struggled to find the right tickets. Whereas Browser Agent’s demo worked well, it still required some interaction to gently nudge it, although it completed 99% of the job.

But given Opera Neon is taking the AI-agentic browser to the next step, it appears most of these issues are ironed out (or being ironed out) to make it a truly useful desktop companion.

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What Does Opera Neon Mean for Opera’s Other Browsers?

But that doesn’t mean Opera’s other browsers are consigned to history. While Opera Neon is a premium, standalone browser, Opera One R2, Opera Air, and Opera Mini will all remain.

I spoke to Henrik Lexow, Opera’s Senior AI Product Director, who confirmed that Opera believes now is the time for AI agents and what Opera calls Web 4o.

Opera Neon is an agentic AI playground right now. It will enable users to do things they simply cannot do in any other browser, including our own—to interact with the AI agentic web in the best way possible and to have AI agents perform tasks and even make things for them. It’s not in competition with our other products, and by launching it this way, we will work with the community to shape the product.

Opera Neon isn’t quite ready for lift-off just yet. You can sign up for Opera Neon to be an early adopter, but the process is invite-only, so you may have to wait a little while. Still, as Opera wants its community to shape Neon’s development, I’d expect the invites to start rolling out soon.