Opera's Neon AI agentic browser promises to do everything – even write code while you're offline

What just happened? Opera has unveiled another new browser, and this one has a differentiating feature: it's the first "AI agentic browser," meaning it can perform tasks on your behalf, including shopping, form-filling, coding, researching, and more, even when you're offline.

Opera Neon – the company used the name for a different browser in 2017 that didn't gain much traction – is designed to understand your intent, assist with tasks, and take actions, according to the website.

The browser has three buttons on the sidebar: Chat, Do, and Make. Make is the most interesting as this is used to make websites, games, code snippets, and more, all using plain English text prompts. It does this using an AI engine with the help of cloud-based AI agents, which means it can work on several tasks when the user is offline.

The Chat option is similar to other AI chatbots, letting you ask general questions or something about the webpage you're viewing, generate images, summarize articles, search the web, etc.

Then there's the Do button. This is where you can instruct Neon's AI agent to carry out autonomous web interactions, such as navigating websites and inputting information. It can also carry out booking, buying, and signing-up tasks. Opera's examples of its abilities include planning trips and finding and buying items such as clothes.

The AI agent doing all this manual work is the Browser Operator that Opera introduced in March. Opera says it does everything locally in the browser to protect user security.

While Opera Neon does sound interesting, it seems a lot of people are already worried about AI's penchant for making stuff up and getting things completely wrong. And while Opera assures a high level of security, that might not be enough to convince everyone. Nevertheless, there are several other companies working on AI agents that will also search the web and carry out online tasks for you.

Opera says Neon will be a premium subscription product when it arrives. We don't know when that will be or how much it will cost, but you can sign up for the waitlist here.