Opera Air

Description

In January 2025, Opera conducted a global survey and asked a simple question: do you ever feel stressed or distracted when browsing the web? Seventy percent of those polled said yes. That figure rose to 87 percent in Germany.

Opera had been observing this tension building for years. The browser had become a navigation tool turned into the center of most people’s working day. People read the news in it, respond to emails in it, sit through meetings in it, and then close it ten hours later feeling worse than when they started. Nobody had designed a browser around that problem. On February 4, 2025, Opera launched Opera Air with one stated goal: to make the browser itself part of the solution.

Opera Air is based on Chromium, the same open source engine that powers Google Chrome and Opera’s other desktop browsers. It has the entire standard feature set — tabbed browsing, built-in ad blocker, tracker protection, free VPN, password manager, and synchronization via an Opera account. What makes it unique is in the sidebar: a suite of wellness tools that are built right into the browser and users can access without having to open another application or switch tabs.

TAKE A BREAK

There are two main wellness features in the sidebar in Opera Air. The first, Take a Break, is a guided session launcher. Users can open it at any time during their browsing session and select from four types of exercises: breathing exercises, neck stretches, guided meditation or full body scan.

Each type of exercise has some variation in length and style. Breathing sessions are from three to sixteen minutes long. Meditation sessions have different voice guides, and users can change the background ambient sounds and music to their liking. The full body scan exercises — which take users through progressive relaxation from head to foot — have a quick version for a fast reset and a longer version for deeper relaxation.

The feature also has a break reminder system called the Body Battery, which is displayed in the sidebar in the form of a three-bar indicator. The bars fade slowly when a user is continuously browsing without interruptions. When they get low enough, the browser signals that it is time for a break. Users set the frequency of the reminder themselves, or turn it off.

By late 2025, Opera said that users had done more than nine months worth of exercises across the platform since launch — a number the company pointed to as evidence that the fact that the wellness tools were embedded into the browser, as opposed to directing users to a separate application, made a significant difference in whether people actually used them.

BOOSTS

The second feature of the sidebar, Boosts, uses binaural beats as its core audio technology. The technique plays two slightly different audio frequencies — one in each ear — that cause the brain to perceive a third frequency that does not physically exist. Different frequency ranges correspond to different mental states: theta waves around 4-8Hz to deep meditation and creative thought, alpha waves around 8-12Hz with relaxed focus, and beta waves with active concentration.

Opera Air was launched with 19 preset Boosts, each combining a binaural beat frequency with lo-fi music and natural ambient sounds. The presets include Creativity Boost, Energized Focus, Deep Relaxation and options geared toward sleep or dream recall. Every aspect of a Boost — frequency, music volume, ambient layer — adjusts independently. Users can also add their own music to a Boost, adding it on top of the binaural beats and ambient sound.

By December 2025, users had listened to more than 12 million minutes of Boosts combined — which is equivalent, Opera noted, to about 23 years of continuous playback. That month the company added a seasonal preset, Winter Night, which includes piano, acoustic guitar, crackling fire and birdsong.

One practical benefit that reviewers mentioned repeatedly was that one click on the sidebar was all it took to open a focus soundscape in Opera Air. Opening up the same kind of content on YouTube or Spotify required switching context, loading a separate interface, and resisting the recommendation algorithms on both platforms before any sound played.

DESIGN

Opera Air’s interface is a deliberately sparse one. The new tab page is a soft, shifting gradient instead of news feeds or sponsored shortcuts. The UI is done with a frosted glass effect that takes its color from the background of the current page, changing its tone as users navigate. The overall direction is inspired by the Scandinavian minimalism, with wide spacing and less visual competition between elements.

The sidebar has shortcuts to Opera AI, Messenger integration and WhatsApp alongside the wellness tools, but the overall visual weight remains low compared to Opera’s other desktop browsers.

OPERA AI

Opera Air has Opera AI as its inbuilt assistant, which is available from the sidebar, without the need for a separate account. The assistant fetches real-time information from the web, summarizes web pages and YouTube videos, analyzes files and screenshots, and creates images within the browser using Google’s Imagen3 model. The assistant operates in a side panel alongside the current page, instead of replacing the current page, so users can query content without losing their place.

Opera AI is based on Opera’s Composer engine, which routes queries through OpenAI and Google AI models based on the task. It was launched across Opera’s browser family in late 2025 as a replacement for the previous assistant, called Aria, which was introduced in 2023.

OXFORD MINDFULNESS Partnership

In August 2025, Opera Air announced a formal partnership with the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation, an academic institution within the University of Oxford, which researches and teaches Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Under the partnership, Opera Air was the headline sponsor of the Foundation’s 2025 Annual Gathering in Marlow, UK — an event bringing together the three academics who originally developed MBCT in the 1990s. Opera filmed the event and made the recorded sessions available through the browser to those who could not attend.

The collaboration also brought Oxford Mindfulness resources – including free live guided meditations and reading recommendations – directly into the Opera Air interface, accessible from the sidebar.

CONTEXT

Opera launched its first browser in 1995 and switched to the Chromium engine in 2013. Opera GX, its gaming-focused browser launched in 2019, proved that a browser based around a specific lifestyle niche could grow its own audience. Opera Air follows the same logic applied to a different group: people who spend most of their productive hours inside a browser and feel the cost of that in their stress levels and concentration.

Opera is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol OPRA and based in Oslo, Norway. The company has 380 million monthly active users across its browser portfolio as of 2025.