With Opera Browser Operator, we have seen the future of the web live

The news of artificial intelligence has been crazy in recent weeks. On a week alone, we were treated to GPT 4.1,, Meta Ai in Facebook and Whatsapp,, LLAMA 4,, Midjourney V7 Alpha or The generation of videos in Gemini. And again, the list is far from exhaustive.

However, since the end of 2024, we are promised that the greatest novelty of the year 2025 in artificial intelligence will be the IA agents. But until then, we had not yet seen the tip of their nose, until attending the Opera Browser Days who have just been held in Lisbon. Against all expectations, it is not thanks to a giant in the sector that we could see a first demonstration live, but well through Opera.

Announced in preversion a month before this demonstration, His Browser Operator presents itself as a native artificial intelligence agent, that is to say directly integrated into the Opera browser, not as an extension or an external service. To explain it simply, its role is to automate tasks that the user could find complex or tedious.

During its recent Opera Browser Days, the Norwegian company presented this IA conversational agent project for the first time. In front of an audience of journalists and content creators of which we were a part, this artificial intelligence tool, still in development, demonstrated its ability to carry out concrete actions on the web instead of the user.

An unprecedented live demonstration at Opera

The exercise of the live demonstration is always perilous, especially when it is a technology under development. This did not prevent Opera from taking up the challenge by showing Browser Operator at work on a specific task: ordering a bouquet of flowers online and having it delivered. Agent IA received an instruction in natural language and then carried out the various stages: selection of flowers, adding to the basket and filling the forms necessary for order, using information previously provided in the initial request.

This demonstration is nothing less than the very first made in public, showing Browser Operator making an order for the public, and potentially the first order of flowers carried out by an agentive AI.

If the operation went well well, it still took three tests for the control of flowers to be passed. This is not surprising, insofar as the product is still in the development phase. In addition, this demo is very promising for the future, because the internet as we know it today is not yet really suitable for AI agents. As the latter democratize, web standards will adapt to make their lives easier. The fact that Browser Operator is already able to order a bouquet of flowers on its own and have it delivered is therefore already a small feat in itself.

For Opera, this presentation was obviously important in more than one title. It indeed offered an “filter” overview of the agent's capacities, but above all represented an undoubtedly historical first step in the integration of AI into the browser.

The displayed ambition is to foreshadow the future of web navigation, where the browser becomes a proactive assistant. The word “revolutionary” was greatly overused by marketing of brands in recent years. However, this demonstration is good and even triggers a little thrill of science fiction in the neck.

To come back a little more in detail on the operation of this AI agent, know that the user interacts with Browser Operator by giving him instructions in natural language, via the Opera sidebar or the command line of the browser. The agent then interprets these requests thanks to the Opera AI engine, named Ai composing Engine. To understand the context and interact with web pages, Browser Operator does not only analyze the pixels displayed on the screen. It is based on the underlying structure of the pages (the Dom Tree) and the browser layout data. According to Opera, this approach allows it to access the entire page without having to scroll it and interact with elements that could be masked for the user, as behind cookie pop-ups. As part of the demo we have seen, the behavior of the IA agent was relatively slow. But it is only for journalists present can well understand the progress of operations. In real conditions, the speed of execution of these agents will be much faster.

Security and confidentiality at the heart of promises

A highly highlighted point by Opera is the local operation of Browser Operator. Unlike many AI solutions that depend on remote servers (Cloud), this agent is processing tasks directly on the user's device. Opera sees two main advantages. On the one hand, faster execution of orders, as it avoids back and forth with an external server. On the other hand, and above all, better protection of personal data and confidentiality.

The agent operating in the browser environment, he can use the existing user connection sessions without the identifiers or passwords being transmitted to a third party. Opera also ensures that no screenshot, keyboard or personal information is sent to its own servers when performing the tasks by the agent. For the steps considered to be sensitive, in particular the entry of payment information or the final validation of an order, Browser Operator is designed to mark a break and explicitly request confirmation from the user. The latter thus keeps total control and can, at any time, regain control of the process or cancel the current task.

Towards a new era of web navigation?

With Browser Operator, Opera is therefore trying nothing less than the outright transformation of the role of the web browser. Krystian Kolondra, executive vice-president of the brand, also said during the initial announcement that if the browser made it possible to access the web for 30 years, he had never been able “do things for you“, while “Now he can“. Opera's objective is to go from a passive consultation tool to an active assistant, capable of freeing time for the user. This is the very concept of aging navigation. And there is no doubt that the Norwegian browser could grab market shares with all powerful Google Chrome if it can offer such a reliable and effective agentive navigation before it.

But Opera is obviously not the only one on this niche and its demonstration is part of a much wider trend, since all the actors of the web and AI seek to integrate artificial intelligence to automate digital interactions. By choosing a local approach based on confidentiality and by maintaining the user at the center of the decision -making process, Opera hopes for its part to seduce and position themselves as quickly as possible as a pioneer actor of this evolution.

And the bet is successful at the moment, since this first public demonstration, although imperfect, has given an overview as clear as it is concrete of what this new form of interaction could be with the web.