Opera Adds an Automated AI Agent To Its Browser (theregister.com) 23
king*jojo shares a report from The Register: The Opera web browser now boasts "agentic AI," meaning users can ask an onboard AI model to perform tasks that require a series of in-browser actions. The AI agent, referred to as the Browser Operator, can, for example, find 12 pairs of men's size 10 Nike socks that you can buy. This is demonstrated in an Opera-made video of the process, running intermittently at 6x time, which shows the user has to type out the request for the undergarments rather than click around some webpages.
The AI, in the given example, works its way through eight steps in its browser chat sidebar, clicking and navigating on your behalf in the web display pane, to arrive at a Walmart checkout page with two six-packs of socks added to the user's shopping cart, ready for payment. [...] Other tasks such as finding specific concert tickets and booking flight tickets from Oslo to Newcastle are also depicted, accelerated at times from 4x to 10x, with the user left to authorize the actual purchase. Browser Operator runs more slowly than shown in the video, though that's actually helpful for a semi-capable assistant. A more casual pace allows the user to intervene at any point and take over.
The AI, in the given example, works its way through eight steps in its browser chat sidebar, clicking and navigating on your behalf in the web display pane, to arrive at a Walmart checkout page with two six-packs of socks added to the user's shopping cart, ready for payment. [...] Other tasks such as finding specific concert tickets and booking flight tickets from Oslo to Newcastle are also depicted, accelerated at times from 4x to 10x, with the user left to authorize the actual purchase. Browser Operator runs more slowly than shown in the video, though that's actually helpful for a semi-capable assistant. A more casual pace allows the user to intervene at any point and take over.
Opera (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
WARNING -- Chinese web browser.
Then why can't any other mobile browser do text reflow when you zoom in? Is China the only country that reads? Isn't this the most basic thing you expect a mobile browser to do? (That's not to say it's easy to implement.) Why would any user tolerate zooming in on a text block and having the edges expand off screen where you can't read it? Has the web become a PDF now?
It feels like the browser accomplishes this by shrinking the site's render area so the text block is smaller, then everything is zoomed so the
Oh for fuck's sake... (Score:2)
I've been using Opera for the oast 15 years. It was great. But in the oast couple years they started adding purchase-oriented plugins that would pop up at random times and just annoy the hell out if me. Now this... I am absolutely sure that this agent will just try to drive us more aggressively towards sales. It's time to look for another browser...
Re:Oh for fuck's sake... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's no coincidence that in the last couple of years Opera has become increasingly Chinese controlled with now over 70% of it owned by the CCP. You should have been looking for another browser years ago, but no worries, FireFox of LibreWolf will do very nicely as your replacement.
Re: Oh for fuck's sake... (Score:2)
Nah. As much as I'd love it to be a viable consideration, Firefox is completely unusable for me at the moment. They've completely messed up the UI.
Re: (Score:2)
LibreWolf is the only real choice now as it's a security fork of Firefox before the stupid began.
The upside is it's the easiest switch in the world for Firefox users. Import your bookmarks and UBlock backups and it's like you never left.
Re:Oh for fuck's sake... (Score:4, Interesting)
They've all been getting like this. I've been using brave, and while I enjoy its reasonably decent ability to dodge youtube ads (though I've had to add uBlock to the mix, adding yet another layer of script breakage, to really hone it) and its pretty good ability to dodge advertising enshitification, they have added their OWN enshification with all of the memecoin crypto shit they add. It was better in the past , but its wearing my patience out pretty badly.
I'm *very* tempted at this point to finally return to my first love, Firefox.
But who am I kidding, the internet itself is broken. Everythings shit. That quip about the internet now being 3 websites that mostly just host screenshots of each other, along with some very dodgy algorithmic shit thats radicalizing people and creating some super fucked up politics....
I actually miss the pre-internet world. At least back then bands had guitars and people visited each others houses and went to pubs. (Well that and I was in my 20s so... I'm probably gonna miss it anyway lol).
Re: (Score:2)
They've all been getting like this. I've been using brave, and while I enjoy its reasonably decent ability to dodge youtube ads (though I've had to add uBlock to the mix, adding yet another layer of script breakage, to really hone it) and its pretty good ability to dodge advertising enshitification, they have added their OWN enshification with all of the memecoin crypto shit they add. It was better in the past , but its wearing my patience out pretty badly.
I'm *very* tempted at this point to finally return to my first love, Firefox.
But who am I kidding, the internet itself is broken. Everythings shit. That quip about the internet now being 3 websites that mostly just host screenshots of each other, along with some very dodgy algorithmic shit thats radicalizing people and creating some super fucked up politics....
I actually miss the pre-internet world. At least back then bands had guitars and people visited each others houses and went to pubs. (Well that and I was in my 20s so... I'm probably gonna miss it anyway lol).
Firefox is traveling enshitification boulevard as well. Our choices are now limited to a couple chrome engine running "open" browsers if we don't want to be bombarded by nonsense and bullshit, and I'm sure they'll succumb before long just so they can avoid being accused of being toys because they don't behave like shit-lords while browsing.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. I moved from Opera to Vivaldi a few years ago (Opera founder Tetzchner is behind this) and for some aggressive ad-pushers to the Brave browser.
Also looks like I have to drop Firefox as my reserve browser with their latest license changes...
I want other stuff though... (Score:2)
What's very funny to me is that there should be a way to easily compare prices between websites and simultaneously track the prices over time. The fact that a website that does this wasn't invented 25 years ago is baffling to me.
Yes, there are some sites that do this to a small degree, in a very buggy way, like CamelCamelCamel and google shopping, but nothing really comprehensive that I know of. Of course this AI won't do that either and by 2050, I suspect, such a site will still not exist.
Re: (Score:2)
I can, for example, point one at multiple documents that I describe only as "spreadsheets", ask it to correlate something between them, and it does gladly- figuring out itself how to parse said documents and integrate the information, and then display it.
Doesn't mean Opera's *will* do this, but if browsers are anything like the IDE space, it's hard to imagine someone hasn't made a plugin for a non-neutered agentic LLM prompt in your browser.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right. This does seem like something LLMs should be really good at, so maybe it will actually come to be soon, if not already.
I haven't seen an LLM that's very good at sorting out recent information from old information on the internet yet, but it shouldn't be hard to make one that does.
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't seen an LLM that's very good at sorting out recent information from old information on the internet yet, but it shouldn't be hard to make one that does.
In training- for sure.
But for an agentic- it's a much easier task.
You'd instruct it to, for example:
Give me a comparison of prices for similar items pulled from the following websites:
blah.com
bleh.com
The LLM would then ask its tool connector to pull those sites and stuff them into its context window. It'd see if it could pull the information you want out of them, and then construct you a comparison of them.
Re: (Score:2)
In EU there is Idealo. Totally randomly clicked on a Samsung tablet in their German version... https://www.idealo.de/preisver... [idealo.de] Of course if you'd live in other palces like e.g. Italy, France, Spain you would use to the corresponding TLD and get the prices for shop in those countries places.
There are other websites/apps of the kind in particular in places where idealo is not active, for example kuantokusta.pt in Portugal.
Re: (Score:2)
Woah. this is a really nice thing.
Why doesn't the US have one? It seems like it would be a hell of a lot easier to make one for the US.
Re: (Score:2)
One word -- Amazon.
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I'm pretty sure you're right. They definitly have a long history of buying up these kinds of sites, like Camelcamelcamel and then leaving them to decay and die, if not just shutting them down. I'm not sure what their game with goodreads is though.
I want to like it (Score:2)
But I can't get rid of the google search bar on a new tab.
Sad too. I was a really early adopter to Opera and fell in love with the gesture browsing when that was a new feature.
Hold on, let me check, yeah, I uninstalled it.
The real power of AI (Score:2)
Can it vote mutiple times (Score:2)
vote
delete cookies
vote
delete cookies
Then people wouldn't have to use macros for the useless fake web inquiries.