Opera

Description

In April 1994, two engineers at Telenor — Norway’s state telecommunications company — began a research project they called MultiTorg. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsoy wanted to create a browser that could be run on any hardware, no matter how humble, and that would strictly adhere to web standards. The project was too much potential to remain inside a phone company. In 1995, they acquired the rights and started the company Opera Software ASA.

The first public release came in 1996. Opera charged a license fee for its first nine years before going free in 2005. What made it unique over the years was not only the cost structure but what it introduced first: tabbed browsing in version 4.0 (2000), pop-up blocking, mouse gestures for navigation (2001), private browsing, and Speed Dial (a visual new tab page with thumbnail shortcuts to favorite sites) in 2007. Each of those features eventually became standard in every major browser.

Opera also became one of the first browsers to take mobile seriously. The company began developing for mobile platforms in 1998 and created Opera Mini, a browser that compressed web pages before sending them to the device, saving a significant amount of data. That product found a large audience in Africa and other emerging markets with limited bandwidth and expensive data plans, and still has over 100 million users in Africa today.

In 2013, Opera switched from its own Presto rendering engine to Chromium, the open source project that also powers Chrome, Edge and Vivaldi. The move gave Opera full compatibility with the modern web but killed a decade of proprietary engine development.

In 2016, a Chinese investment consortium headed by Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360 bought Opera’s browser and brand operations for around $600 million. The original Opera Software changed its name to Otello and kept the advertising and app businesses. Opera was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange again in July 2018, raising $115 million in its IPO. Kunlun Tech currently owns around 69 percent of shares, and Kunlun’s controlling shareholder Zhou Yahui is chairman and CEO of Opera. Opera is still headquartered in Oslo and is a Norwegian company under Norwegian law, but the company’s ownership structure comes under scrutiny for the same reasons that Kaspersky and Yandex do – the concerns are around data access and not any sort of documented technical violation.

CURRENT PRODUCT: OPERA ONE

Opera’s flagship desktop browser is branded Opera One since June 2023 when the company relaunched it around a new modular architecture. The browser is built on Chromium and supports Chrome Web Store extensions so the extension ecosystem is similar to that available to Chrome users. The interface revolves around a left side sidebar and a tab bar on the top.

The latest major release, Opera One R3, came out in January 2026 and introduced three major upgrades. Tab Islands — Opera’s system for automatically grouping related tabs together — received color-coding and naming, making it easier to manage multiple research threads or projects at once. The Opera browser AI engine was rebuilt using architecture from Opera Neon, the company’s experimental agentic browser, and the company says it provides 20 percent faster responses. The AI can now work in the context of a particular tab or Tab Island, so it takes answers from what the user is currently browsing, not mixing content from different sessions. It also processes queries about YouTube videos: users can ask what a video is about, find a particular moment in it or get a summary without watching the entire video. Split Screen mode was expanded from two tabs to four with horizontal and grid layout options for larger monitors.

BUILT-IN FEATURES

Opera One comes with multiple tools that most browsers need extensions to offer. The built-in ad blocker works with a single toggle and also prevents cryptocurrency mining scripts that are running in the background without the user knowing. The free VPN passes browser traffic through one of Opera’s servers in various regions, masking the user’s IP address. The VPN only covers browser traffic and not system-wide connections; there is a subscription-based VPN Pro service for device-wide coverage. Both VPN and ad blocker do not require any extensions or account.

The sidebar contains integrations for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Discord, Instagram, X, Bluesky, Slack, TikTok and VK — all accessed directly within the browser, without needing to open separate tabs or apps. The R3 update added Gmail and Google Calendar to this list. A built-in music player supports multiple streaming services, and the January 2026 update introduced a Spotify-created theme, Sonic, in which the visual background of the browser reacts to whatever music is playing in the player.

Flow is responsible for the synchronization of files and notes between the desktop browser and Opera’s mobile apps. The feature transmits links, screenshots and files between devices without the use of third-party services. A screenshot tool called Snapshot takes a picture of the current page or a selected area and opens up a markup interface for annotations before sharing.

Mouse gestures, a feature in Opera since 2001, still work: Holding the right mouse button and swiping in a direction will navigate backwards, forwards, open a new tab or close the current one. Speed Dial, the thumbnail-based new tab page introduced in 2007, displays pinned sites and a customizable news feed.

Picture-in-Picture draws video from any tab into a floating window that remains visible to the user as they browse other pages. A Battery Saver mode, which reduces CPU usage by limiting background tab activity and reducing visual effects, which Opera says increases laptop battery life noticeably.

OPERA AI

Opera AI, which replaced the previous assistant in the browser, called Aria, in late 2025, and it integrates in the sidebar and the address bar. Users do not need an account to open it for basic queries. Signed-in users receive additional features such as image generation using Google’s Imagen model, file analysis, and cross-device AI history. The assistant is based on real-time results from the web and not on a fixed training cutoff, so it can answer queries about current events without the limitations that exist with offline models.

The Composer infrastructure behind Opera AI sends queries to OpenAI and Google AI models based on the type of task, with Opera controlling which model processes which request.

THE OPERA PRODUCT FAMILY

Opera One is the mainstream desktop browser. Opera GX was launched in 2019 as a browser tailored for gamers, introducing CPU, RAM, and network bandwidth limiters so gaming sessions and browser usage don’t compete for resources, and integrations for Twitch and Discord and a visually distinct interface with customizable color schemes.

Opera Air debuted February 2025 as a mindfulness-focused browser that has built-in breathing exercises, guided meditation, binaural beat soundscapes (called Boosts), and a minimalist interface that aims to reduce the stress associated with browsing.

Opera Mini covers data constrained mobile users. Opera Neon, which opened public access in December 2025, is an experimental agentic browser where the AI is able to browse, click, fill forms and act autonomously on the user’s behalf — the technology that provided the engine architecture to Opera One R3.

Opera has 380 million monthly active users across its product portfolio as of 2025.