Opera drops Neon, a local-first agentic browser

For the past year, tech companies have been obsessed with turning the web browser into an AI agent that can do your chores for you. The catch is that most of them either live in slick demo videos or require piping every click through a remote cloud server.

On Tuesday, browser veteran Opera officially launched Neon, its new AI-first browser aimed squarely at power users. After being in closed preview since May, the company has started sending early access invites for a hefty subscription fee of $19.99 per month, with wider rollout planned in the coming months.

Browsing on your behalf, strictly on-device

The centerpiece of Neon is a feature dubbed Neon Do. Instead of just answering questions like a typical chatbot, it acts on web pages on your behalf. Opera showed it filling out forms, comparing specs across multiple storefronts, and even ordering groceries.

It also taps into your daily workflows. For example, it can summarize a Substack post you just opened and shoot the takeaways directly into a Slack channel. Because the browser has the full context of your browsing history, you can simply ask it to pull data from a YouTube video you watched last week or an article you read yesterday.

Crucially, Opera says all these agentic actions happen locally on your machine without routing data through third-party cloud services. Users retain manual control over when the agent executes or pauses. With over 300 million active users globally and headquarters in Oslo, Opera is clearly pitching this privacy-first angle to court privacy-conscious Europeans navigating strict regulatory scrutiny.

Reusable Cards and isolated Tasks

Beyond basic browsing automation, Neon borrows some of the best productivity tricks we have seen in modern browser design. It introduces Cards, which are essentially repeatable prompt templates that work like an IFTTT for generative AI. You can snap together cards like pull-details and comparison-table to automatically benchmark products across tabs, or use templates shared by the community—a clear nod to Dia’s Skills feature.

To prevent context bleed, Neon includes Tasks. These are self-contained workspaces that group relevant tabs and AI chats together, giving each project its own persistent context like a hybrid of Chrome tab groups and Arc spaces. Neon can also draft and execute code right inside the browser to spin up quick mini-apps, charts, and visual tables on the fly.

Why it matters

If you spend your entire workday cross-referencing tabs, extracting data, and pasting summaries into Slack, Neon looks like a legitimate productivity upgrade. But at $19.99 every month, we think everyday users should wait. Web agents are notorious for looking flawless in polished demos and breaking the moment an e-commerce checkout page throws a captcha or changes its layout.

The real story here is how aggressive the browser wars have become. With Perplexity launching Comet, The Browser Company building Dia, and OpenAI reportedly prepping a Chromium-based browser powered by its Operator agent, everyone wants to own the execution layer of the internet. Opera is betting that local-first privacy and heavy automation can convince power users to pay up before Big Tech bakes the same tricks into their free default browsers.