Opera Neon promises to be the future of the browser. It is an ambitious vision yet to mature

I’ve been using it for a week Opera Neon and I don’t know if I’m testing the future of web browsing or participating in a psychological experiment on how much friction a human tolerates before returning to their usual browser. Probably both.

Neon comes standard with everything that any veteran Opera user takes for granted: side messaging integrations, music apps in streamingthe multimedia panel… It is the reminder that, despite all the agentic experimentation, there is still an Opera underneath: practical, comfortable and designed for those who live glued to several platforms at the same time.

The promise is seductive: a browser that not only answers questions, but act for you. Who browses, compares, reserves, creates. Who understands what you want to do and does it while you focus on more important things. Opera calls this “agentic AI“, and technically it is correct: Neon can take control of the browser, open tabs, fill out forms, compare products. It is AI with hands, it is Opera’s proposal for the same field as Perplexity with Comet or OpenAI with ChatGPT Atlas.

The problem is that those hands are sometimes clumsy, unpredictable and dangerously overconfident.

Three brains in one body

To understand Neon you have to accept that It is not an AI browser. It is a browser with three AIs living together. Chat, Do and Make. Each one with its function, its purpose, its personality. And here begins the first big problem: knowing which one to use at all times is a guessing exercise.

• Chat is the most familiar. A conversational chatbot that answers questions, summarizes pages, translates texts. Typical. It works well when you’re not making things up, which is about 70% of the time. I asked him to count the comments on several articles and he responded with 400 words explaining that there were none. when there were four.
• Do is where magic and terror live. You ask him to book a CrossFit class, find the cheapest flight to Lisbon, compare prices on headphones, unsubscribe from some newsletters. And sometimes it does. Open tabs, browse websites, fill out fields. Watching him work is hypnotic. It’s also slow, erratic, and occasionally catastrophic. In a test I asked her to add flowers to a store cart. Instead of somehow inferring my zip code or asking me about it, he directly introduced 28001: madridcentrismo to the song. While I, helpless, did click on the correct options that I was completely unaware of. There is no way to correct it while working. You can only watch, like someone who sees their autonomous car getting dangerously close to the cliff.

Another example with Do:

What he did was open Google Shopping, enter the term and not be able to click ‘Search’, apparently due to some subtle change in the website’s code. I gave it myself and Neon continued. It took a long time just to choose the order by price from lowest to highest. Finally he wrote the answer:

Happy ending, although it is difficult to think of use scenarios where the use really compensates for the time and supervision it requires. If someone doesn’t know about Google Shopping, this is a good use case. If someone knows Google Shopping, they only have to do two clicks.

Another example: reading some recipes Straight to the PalateI asked him to add all the ingredients necessary to make them to the Mercadona cart.

This was one of those scenarios where there was no way I was going to complete the mission.

• Make is the most ambitious. Generate code, build web applications, create videos. I asked him for a memory game with Spanish vocabulary and he did it in minutes. Rough, but functional. It’s like having a mini-developer living in your browser, working in a virtual environment that disappears when you close the tab. A brilliant idea. A little polished perhaps, but brilliant.

There are also the cardsa kind of templates prompts that function as mental shortcuts. You can combine them – “summarize + compare”, “decisions + follow-up” – or create your own so you don’t start from scratch every time you talk to the AI. It’s a simple but powerful idea: it makes user learning part of the system. Similar to what you propose Day with his Skills. It’s a good idea.

What is not being said about Opera Neon

Here comes the part that interests me the most, the one I read between the lines after a week living with this thing.

Opera Neon is not really a product. It is a testing ground with product pricing. It is a public beta disguised as a premium service. And that wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it didn’t cost $20 a month.

Let me be clear: I’ve seen enough technology launches to recognize when a company is testing concepts in the open field. And Neon is that. The bugs They are not occasional, they are structural, like the hallucinations.

The Do agent disconnects if your computer goes to sleep. Chat responses are verbose. The Cards interface—those shortcuts prompts reusable—is full of examples with no real useful content.

But there’s something more interesting going on here. Opera is making a counterintuitive bet at the worst possible time.

We are in 2025:

• Google gives away Gemini in Chrome.
• Perplexity has Comet.
• The Browser Company (Arc’s company) has Day.
• Microsoft puts Copilot everywhere.
• And OpenAI recently launched ChatGPT Atlas.

The industry consensus (Dia is the exception) is clear: AI in browsers should be free, ubiquitous, invisible. And Opera comes out with a product that costs the same as a subscription to ChatGPT Plus (which lets you use Atlas in its entirety in addition to an entire ChatGPT), that misses more than it hits, and that asks you to change the way you browse the Internet entirely.

It’s crazy. Or it’s genius.

The underlying thesis (and why it might be right)

Here’s what I think Opera understands and the rest doesn’t: If AI is really going to do things for you, it can’t be free.

I’m not just talking about the computational cost, which is real. I mean something deeper. If a browser is going to take control of your tabs, access sites where you are logged inmake purchases, send emails, etc., you need a business model that is not “we spy on you and sell your data.” You need a business model where you be the customer, not the product.

Neon’s architecture points in that direction. Do execute sensitive tasks locally. It does not send your passwords to the cloud. It works with sites where you are already authenticated without sharing credentials with third-party servers. It’s a hybrid design: local when you can, cloud when you have to.

This is important because we are about to hand over a lot of power to these agents. And Opera is betting—perhaps prematurely, but betting—that people will pay for an agent who doesn’t sell their information in exchange. 20 euros per month is the asking price.

The problem of the moment

But there is a problem of timing that Opera cannot solve with good intentions alone.

We come to this era of agentic browsers from a place of boredom. We are tired of technology that asks us for more attention, more data, more time. And Opera presents us with a browser that literally puts virtual reality glasses on you but to browse the Internet. That asks you to trust blindly while a bot opens fifteen tabs and fills out forms. Which tells you: “give me more control, not less.”

The irony is that the concept is solid. Really. There are tasks on the Internet that are pure bureaucratic friction. Compare 47 flights, book appointments, search for the same product in five stores. Things that don’t require human creativity, just time and patience. Automating that a lot makes sense.

The problem is that Neon doesn’t do it well enough yet. And it asks us to trust (and pay) while it learns.

Is it worth 20 dollars a month?

This is the question. And the honest answer is: it depends on who you are and how desperate you are to make up time.

• If you are a power user who spends his days doing complex research, comparing information from multiple sources, generating reports, building small tools… Neon makes sense. The Tasks feature—workspaces with shared context between tabs—is really useful. Being able to ask the browser “compare these three products I have open” without copying and pasting anything is magic when it works.
• If you are a normal user who just wants to browse the Internet… you can do it with Neon without having to pay, but almost all other browsers are free too. Including, probably, the one you already use.

But beyond the individual calculation, Neon raises an uncomfortable question about the future. If browsers are going to become truly agentic—and all indications are—who will capture the value of that automation? AI companies that charge subscriptions? The companies that dominate distribution like Apple or Google? Or will it remain as commodityandwith open source models matching proprietary ones in months?

Opera is betting that it will soon come up with something that others can’t replicate. That its hybrid architecture, its Tasks and Cards system, its subscription model, will build a moat defensive. But after a week of use, I don’t see that moat. I see good execution of concepts that others can copy.

The provisional verdict

Opera Neon is fascinating, frustrating and premature. It is the future arriving with the seams exposedasking $20 a month for the privilege of seeing them.

I wouldn’t recommend it to almost anyone right now, only enthusiasts and early adopters. But I don’t want to stop using it. Because of all the AI ​​browsers I’ve tried, this is one of the few that actually tries to change what a browser is, not just add features to it. And that, even if it is clumsy, even if it fails, even if it costs too much, deserves attention. Even if it is shared

The future of the web probably looks like something like Neon. Only it will work better, cost less, and arrive when we are ready for it. I don’t think it’s now, yet.

In Xataka | In case we didn’t have enough subscriptions, AI wants to add one more to our lives: your Internet browser

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