The latest Opera Developer build comes with improved AI integration. Opera highlights new tab management options, including the ability to group or close tabs based on your instructions.
Commands such as “close all YouTube tabs” or “create tab groups for all open tabs” should work now. Opera says that everything is processed locally on the user device.
The details:
- You need the latest Opera Developer build for that. It is not yet in Beta or Stable.
- Supported commands are close, group, pin, or save as bookmarks.
- The feature works only if you have at least 5 tabs open.
Did you know? Opera launched Dynamic Themes recently as well.
Opera Aria: tab management
All you have to do is activate the Aria interface with a click on “Ask Aria” or the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+). In some countries, it is Ctrl-Shift-7 instead. The Aria toolbar entry highlights the shortcut.
The prompt pops up in the middle of the browser window. All you have to do now is to type the command.
If you type “close YouTube” and have more than 5 tabs open in Opera, Opera will close all YouTube tabs. This worked considerably well. I added a few YouTube related pages from other sites, and they remained open.
When asked to close any tab that contains the term YouTube, Opera did not comply and closed only the YouTube domain tabs.
It is likely programmed to look only at the domain name when closing tabs.
Similarly, when I asked it to group all YouTube tabs, it would only add YouTube domain tabs to the group.
That is a somewhat of a let down, but the feature will likely be improved in future versions of the Opera browser.
Closing Words
I was not a huge fan of AI in browsers up until now. Reasons are that I do not want data to be transferred to a cloud server so that AI can process it. This is the case for Chrome’s and Edge’s automatic tab management features.
Opera says that Aria’s tab feature runs locally, which is good. While tab management powered by AI is not really something that you need when you have ten or so tabs open, I can see it useful in some scenarios.
Quickly grouping all vacation related tabs or bookmarking them can be useful. Sure, you can also do that manually, but AI may speed things up.
If you have two hundred or so tabs open, it may save you time. If, a big one, Aria gets it right every time. If the AI misses tabs or deletes the wrong ones, that could turn into an ugly situation unless you backup tabs regularly.
All in all though, it is an interesting addition that I will keep an eye on.
What is your take on this? Can you see yourself typing commands to an AI to manage tabs? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
This is not AI. It’s just a better command prompt. We forgot completely that PC operating systems have had command prompts forever. Now command prompts got more user-friendly and moving to other pieces of software. I remember trying to use voice command software to control a PC 10–15 years ago. Nobody even thought to call it AI, and it did not need to transfer data to the cloud to work.