Do you think that submitting queries to ChatGPT or DeepSeek to get ready-made answers is not enough? Here is Browser Operator, an AI agent for the Opera browser. It takes care of browsing the web for you to respond to your injunctions. The company detailed the workings of this tool in a preview in a blog article. It is also presented in the following video.
Nike socks for watching a football match
The Browser Operator proposition is well illustrated in the demo: you formulate written commands, and it takes care of executing them for you.
The first example is probably enough to understand the principle. The user asks the agent to find pairs of Nike socks in a certain size. The result is sent directly to merchant sites; the sender only has to pay.
The second illustration of Browser Operator's capabilities is of the same order. It is just the substance of the request that changes: it concerns obtaining tickets for the next Newcastle home game in the Premier League. However, the instructions are more complete than for socks.
Of course, Browser Operator is not just capable of shopping. It can perform various menial tasks of the same order. In short, the idea is to chew the search work until the end, so to speak. With all the orientation biases that this implies.
Opera emphasizes transparency. The user can see what is happening at any point in the process as well as the steps that were necessary to carry it out. It is possible to interrupt the agent and cancel a request.
The future of browsing?
Opera Software, which had already made its browser one of the first to give pride of place to AI with Opera One, sees this type of agent as the future of browsing. According to it, Browser Operator marks a "new paradigm" in the history of browsing.
Krystian Kolondra, the executive vice president, explains: "For more than 30 years, the browser has allowed you to access the web, but it has never been able to do things for you. Now it can. It's unlike anything we've seen or delivered before. The Browser Operator that we are presenting today marks the first step towards the shift of the browser’s role from a display engine to an agentic application that performs tasks for users.”
It should be noted that in the field of AI, the term agentic does not have the same (negative) meaning as in social sciences. It characterizes software capable of making decisions autonomously (or with minimal human intervention).
Opera does not, of course, have a monopoly on this type of agent. Most companies specializing in AI are developing them. A few days ago, Perplexity presented Comet, also promising “agentic search.” Let’s also mention Operator from Open AI, launched in January.
However, the company is emphasizing confidentiality. It claims that Browser Operator “differs from agentic browsing approaches currently being tested by other companies” by being more privacy-preserving. How? By “not relying on screenshots or videos of the browsing session, nor on a version of the browser running in the cloud or on a virtual machine.” Finally, user data is stored locally on the device.
Browser Operator will be rolled out broadly in the “near future”.
Source: Opera
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