Opera, the Norway-based browser company, has announced a groundbreaking feature called Browser Operator, which promises to revolutionize the way users interact with the web. This innovative feature, currently in preview, enables the browser to complete tasks for users on different websites, freeing up time for more important activities.

In a demo video, Opera showcased the Browser Operator's capabilities, demonstrating its ability to find a pair of socks on Walmart, purchase tickets for a football match on the club's website, and book a flight and hotel on Booking.com. While it's unclear whether the agent can address broader queries, such as finding the cheapest ticket from London to New York for tomorrow, the feature's potential is undeniable.

Opera's Browser Operator builds upon the company's existing AI features, which allow users to ask questions about a website. This new feature takes it a step further by leveraging webpage context to automate tasks. The company plans to make the feature available to users through its feature drop program soon.

One of the key benefits of the Browser Operator is its ability to preserve user privacy. Unlike cloud-based or virtual machine-reliant agents, Opera's feature works natively, ensuring that user data remains protected. Users also have full control over the agent's actions, with the ability to take control of the screen at any point in time.

According to Krystian Kolondra, EVP at Opera, "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."

The Browser Operator's promise is reminiscent of other agents that have been introduced, such as OpenAI's Operator, which uses a browser to carry out tasks for ChatGPT Pro users. The Browser Company's Arc Browser and Perplexity's Comet browser also boast agentic capabilities. By releasing an early preview, Opera is positioning itself as a key player in the AI agents race.

While it's difficult to assess the feature's effectiveness without widespread user adoption, Opera's move marks an important step towards exploring the potential of AI-powered task automation in browsers. As the company continues to develop and refine the Browser Operator, it will be interesting to see how it fares in real-world scenarios and how users respond to this new paradigm in browser functionality.

The implications of Opera's Browser Operator are far-reaching, with the potential to transform the way we interact with the web. As AI technology continues to advance, it's likely that we'll see more browsers incorporating agentic capabilities, ultimately changing the role of browsers from mere display engines to task-performing applications.