App-like experiences from prompts

Opera unveiled Neon, a desktop browser that lets users create lightweight “apps” via natural-language prompts and save reusable “cards” to automate tasks. The company pitches Neon as a bridge to agentic browsing, where the browser can draft pages, summarize documents, and set up repeatable workflows without extensions. Early demos showed card-based recipes for trip planning, research digests, and storefront builders generated from plain English.

Competition in the “agentic” race

Neon enters a crowded field alongside Arc, Perplexity’s browser experiments, and features layered onto Chrome and Edge. The challenge is trust, speed, and guardrails: users will want transparency on data handling and the ability to audit actions AI agents take on their behalf. Opera says on-device controls and clear consent flows are central; it is courting creators and power users who want faster web workflows without coding. Rollout begins today with iterative feature drops planned through Q4.