Opera launches its AI-centric Neon browser

Browser maker Opera launched its AI-centric browser Neon Tuesday, with the ability to create apps through AI prompts and create repeatable prompts through a feature it calls cards. With this Opera joins a growing number of companies like Perplexity and The Browser Company that are trying to make agentic browsers happen.

The company first announced that it was working on Neon in May, but the browser was in closed preview. It will now start sending invites to select people, who can use the browser for a fee of $19.99 per month.

“We built Opera Neon for ourselves – and for everyone who uses AI extensively in their day-to-day. Today, we’re welcoming the first users who will help shape the future of agentic browsing with us,” said Krystian Kolondra, EVP Browsers at Opera, in a statement.

There are a few key parts of the browser. First, there is a plain old chatbot that you can converse with to get answers to your questions. The more agentic feature of the browser is called Neon Do, which will help you get tasks done. For instance, it can summarize a Substack blog and post the summary to a Slack channel. As the browser has the context of your browsing history, you can also ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week or the post that you read yesterday.

Opera’s new browser can also write snippets of code, which is helpful for you to create visual reports with tables and charts. It is not clear if you can share these mini-apps with others at the moment.

The Browser Company’s Dia has a feature called Skills, which lets you invoke a prompt repeatedly like a command or an app. Neon lets you build a similar repeatable prompt using cards. Think of this as IFTTT (IF This Then That) of AI prompting. You can combine cards like “pull-details” and “comparison-table” to create a new prompt for comparing products across tabs. Just like in Dia, you can build your own Cards or use the ones that are created by the community.

Opera Neon is also bringing a new tab organizational feature called Tasks, which are contained workspaces of AI chats and tabs. This feature is more like Tab Groups combined with Arc Browser’s workspaces feature, which has its own context for AI.

In its demo, Opera shows Neon completing tasks like ordering groceries for you. We have seen previously that demos don’t often reflect real-world scenarios — especially with AI products. That means Neon will have to prove its claim in real life.

With this launch, Opera is directly competing with the likes of Perplexity’s Comet and Dia. Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft are also adding more AI-powered features to their browsers. Unlike the competitors, Opera is positioning Neon as a product for power users with its monthly subscription.