Opera Neon review: three AI agents, one confusing browser

Opera has started letting people off the waitlist for Neon, a new AI-focused browser that packs three bots into one product: Chat for answers, Do for taking actions in the browser, and Make for building small web tools. The app keeps familiar Opera perks like a VPN, ad blocking, and a sidebar for chat apps, and it puts AI front and center with a home-screen toggle for web search, Chat, Do, or Make.

Neon costs $19.90 per month and uses models from OpenAI and Google, though Opera does not say which models power each feature. It arrives in a crowded field that includes Google’s Gemini-enhanced Chrome and Perplexity’s Comet. Chat is the most straightforward piece. It can summarize pages and handle quick research, but it often replies with long answers and sometimes guesses when it cannot access what you asked for, like misreporting the number of comments on recent articles.

Opera says those tasks actually belong to Do, the agent that can click, scroll, and expand elements for you. Do shows both promise and pitfalls. It can book classes, find items, or compile results, yet you cannot steer it mid-task, switch back to Chat in the same window, or easily correct mistakes. In testing, it added an ill-suited funerary wreath to a cart and claimed theater tickets were unavailable when plenty existed.

It also works slower than doing the same tasks by hand and periodically flashes a red alert when it needs human help. Make runs in a contained “virtual computer,” avoiding clutter on your machine. It built a Spanish vocabulary matching game that worked but felt clunky. Another feature, Cards, reusable prompts for any agent, could become useful, though the current catalog is thin and heavy on gimmicks.

Neon remains an early-access work in progress, according to Opera’s Krystian Kolondra, and some safeguards, like pausing for user approval are not enabled yet. For now, the subscription asks people to pay for capabilities many rivals offer free, while Neon’s trio of agents demands oversight. The result is a confusing AI browser that expects users to adapt to it more than it adapts to them.