Norway-based browser company Opera announced a new agent feature called Browser Operator as a feature preview. The Browser Operator feature, when released, will complete tasks for you on different websites, the company claims.
In a demo video, the company showed the agent finding a right pair of socks from Walmart, tickets for a football match from the club’s site, and a flight and a hotel for a trip from Booking.com. It’s not clear if the agent works on a single site as a context or if it can address wider queries like “Find me the cheapest ticket from London to New York for tomorrow” and look across sites.
The company already had AI features that let users ask questions about a website. Having a feature use the webpage context is the step towards automating some of the tasks. Opera said that the feature will be available to users through its feature drop program soon.
The company said that the Browser Operator lets users see what it is up to and take control of the screen at any point in time. Opera noted that because the agent works natively without relying on a cloud instance of a browser or a virtual machine, it preserves user privacy better.
“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. 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,” said Krystian Kolondra, EVP at Opera, said in a statement.
The promise of the feature is the same as other agents that we have seen. You describe the task to the agent, it will browse around the website and trying to go through different pages to finish the task, and you will have free time to do whatever you want to do between these tasks.
However, we don’t know how much Opera’s feature will be effective when it is released to all users. It might even fail in tasks the company shows in its videos in different environments and sites. However, Opera realizes that it is important to begin working on such features as AI companies are relying heavily on browsers for agents to carry out tasks.
OpenAI has released its own solution called Operator, which uses a browser, to ChatGPT Pro users this year. The Browser Company, which makes Arc Browser, teased a new browser called Dia with agentic capabilities. Perplexity is preparing to launch its own browser called Comet. With an early preview, Opera also wants to put itself in the AI agents race.
