The Norwegian browser company Opera is announcing the Browser Operator, a native AI agent that is able to perform browsing tasks for users, allowing them to focus on more exciting parts of their lives instead. The introduction of agentic browsing marks a major paradigm shift for browsers, and with today’s preview, Opera is taking the lead on it.

“For more than 30 years, the browser gave you access to the web, but it has never been able to get stuff done for you. Now it can. This is different from anything we’ve seen or shipped so far,” said Krystian Kolondra, EVP “The Browser Operator we’re presenting today marks the first step towards shifting the role of the browser from a display engine to an application that is agentic and performs tasks for its users.”

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User’s natural language transformed into browsing tasks

The Browser Operator, currently being demoed as a feature preview, is designed to give users superpowers when browsing – through AI agentics, while safeguarding their privacy. The concept is simple: Browser Operator allows the browser users to explain what they need it to do in natural language, and the browser sets out to perform tasks for them. They can, for example, ask it to buy them a pack of 10 pairs of white tennis socks from Nike in a size 12. The Browser Operator will then perform this task, freeing the user’s time that would have been otherwise spent on this menial task. This aligns with the broader role of the browser, which is there to make users more powerful while online and to give them tools to use their time more efficiently.

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The browser that works the web for you

While working on completing a task, Browser Operator lets users see what’s going on at any point in the process as well as what steps it took to complete it. During this process, the user remains in full control and can take over or cancel the task at any given moment. The best part is that Browser Operator works in the same environment as the user: the browser. It doesn’t require a virtual machine or a server in the cloud.

Faster and private agentic browsing with user in control

Opera’s AI agent differs from the approaches to agentic browsing that are currently being tested by other companies. Opera’s solution utilizes native, client-side solutions. It protects user privacy by not relying on screenshots or video capture of the browsing session, nor on a version of the browser running in the cloud or a virtual machine. Instead, the Browser Operator is interacting deep in the core of the browser,  keeping user data locally on the device.