Opera Browsers Reimagined With A Faster, Smarter, Context-Aware AI, Powered By Google's Gemini

Opera’s latest upgrade marks one of the most significant shifts in the browser industry in years.

Opera announced that Opera One, Opera GX, and Opera Neon are all receiving a new generation of built-in AI, a system rebuilt from the ground up and now powered by Google's latest Gemini models. The rollout is global, immediately reaching its more than 80 million users, offering advanced AI tools for free and signalling Opera’s intention to position the browser itself as the next major interface for AI-assisted work and entertainment.

What makes this release stand out is how deeply integrated the AI is within the browsing experience.

Instead of functioning like a separate chatbot window, Opera’s new AI lives in a side panel that automatically adapts to whatever the user is doing.

It can read webpage content, compare information across tabs, summarize long articles, or even interpret video content.

This is something existing AI assistants often struggle to do fluidly.

The assistant also supports voice input and output, and users can drag in files ranging from images to videos for instant analysis. This contextual awareness is possible because the browser already sits at the center of users’ digital workflows, and Opera is leveraging that vantage point to build an AI that feels less like an external tool and more like a natural part of browsing.

Underneath the interface, Opera rebuilt its AI engine using an agentic architecture derived from Opera Neon, enabling smarter, multi-step reasoning and faster performance.

According to the company, this redesign delivers roughly 20% faster responses, giving the assistant a noticeably snappier feel compared to earlier versions. The integration of Google's Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro models further boosts its capabilities, bringing state-of-the-art language, vision and reasoning features directly into the browser.

This positions Opera as one of the first mainstream browsers to adopt agentic browsing AI at scale while using top-tier large models from Google.

And this approach allows Opera to utilize Gemini to conduct a '1-minute Deep Research' mode.

"In the new one-minute-research mode, Opera Neon is dividing the problem as much as possible in order to employ as many ‘researchers’ as possible on the same task. This new mode for the deep research agent acts as a point in-between a simple AI query and a full-on deep research that turns useful since the user is not always in need of a full deep research for every query that requires a little bit more than just an AI overview," Opera explained.

In addition to that, today’s update also introduces a model selector in Neon Chat.

Also, the integration allows it to work with Google Docs.

Read: Opera Neon Levels Up With 'Deep Research' Feature And Google Veo 3.1 Integration

Opera also emphasizes that users maintain complete control over what the AI can or cannot see.

Since the new system is designed to use browsing context, privacy became a central design priority. Users can restrict the AI from accessing page content, tab data, or personal files, ensuring the assistant only engages when intentionally activated. In a period when AI features often raise concerns around data access, Opera’s pitch focuses on transparency and user-choice, promising that no contextual data is shared without explicit permission.

This upgrade is not only about convenience because it also ties directly into Opera’s business strategy.

The company recently reported a 17% year-over-year increase in query revenue, a metric that includes user-initiated actions across traditional search and now also AI-powered interactions within Opera’s browsers.

The company connects these gains to the rise of AI tools integrated directly into browsing flows, suggesting that users increasingly rely on AI for finding products, services, and information. The new AI architecture is designed to support richer, more complex user queries, creating pathways to commerce and partner platforms that are directly relevant to users’ tasks.

This evolution aligns with a broader industry trend: the browser is becoming the next major AI frontier.

While standalone chatbots offer powerful models, they cannot naturally access the real-time context of users’ digital activity. Browsers, however, have direct visibility into tabs, page content, browsing patterns and multimedia elements. Opera argues that this context unlocks more personalized, efficient assistance, enabling AI to help users research, shop, learn and create without leaving the flow of their browsing experience.

This echoes Google’s own strategic direction, including AI Overviews and new AI modes in Search—technologies that reshape how users retrieve information. Both companies see the browser as an increasingly central hub for AI-driven interactions.

Beyond the technology itself, the announcement reflects Opera’s ongoing momentum as a company.

In parallel with the AI rollout, Opera recently reported strong financial performance, including revenue growth and resilient stock performance despite mixed earnings expectations.

Altogether, Opera’s new AI release signals a shift in how the browser fits into everyday computing. Instead of being a passive window to the internet, the browser is transforming into an active collaborator, capable of understanding context, making sense of information on behalf of users, and accelerating the tasks people already do online.

With Google’s Gemini models woven into the experience, and an agentic engine designed for speed and intelligence, Opera is betting that the future of AI will live not in separate apps but directly inside the place users already spend most of their digital lives: the browser.